Down to Earth
by xenzen
Summary: What is Shepard to her crew? A chance for vengeance. A hero. A mentor. A leader. Redemption. Hope. Victory. A means to an end. But what is Kaidan to Shepard? Simply: someone who can tell her 'no'. Liberties have been taken with the From Ashes DLC.
1. Chapter 1

It wasn't the first time Shepard had called members of her ground team together for a briefing, but it had been a long time since she'd called all of them together. With seven bodies in the tiny conference room, it was overly warm and a little claustrophobic, but Kaidan forgot all about such trivialities when he saw the images projected on one of the walls.

Even though the commander had already discussed their next mission with him, the sight of their destination still sent a shock through him. He'd seen views of the planet from space before, from vid-cards Jenkins had shared with him, and then, of course, from that memorable mission briefing with Shepard, Nihlus, and Anderson. Judging from their straightened postures and intent expressions, the others recognized them, too.

"Eden Prime," Liara said in a soft voice, speaking more to herself than anyone else. "This is where it all began."

Shepard nodded. "Where we found the Prothean beacon that warned us about the Reapers."

"While I was buried neck-deep in paperwork and regulations," Garrus mused, "it turns out Saren was running around with the geth, shooting his fellow Spectre in the back and planning to blow up a human colony. Can't believe I missed all the excitement."

"If I had just been faster, more careful, I might have reached the Council in time to warn them," Tali said, looking down at her hands as she twisted them together. "I was so naive back then... I didn't realize no one would believe me."

"We believed you, Tali," Kaidan said. "It was damn brave, what you did."

"You didn't just believe me - you protected me. I wouldn't have lasted five minutes without you, Shepard and Ashley coming to my rescue," the quarian said, shaking her head.

"Oh, I don't know, Tali," the commander demurred with a lopsided smile. "You looked like you were holding your own just fine. Hell of a way to start your Pilgrimage, though."

"So... why're we talkin' 'bout ancient history?" James asked as he leaned against the wall.

"Alliance Command thinks the Illusive Man took an interest after we found the beacon that gave me the vision on Eden Prime," Shepard said, consulting a pad. "He began funding additional archaeological digs on the planet, looking for more Prothean artifacts that might've been buried nearby."

"Must've been a bitch, following _those_ money trails," Garrus observed.

"It took a team of volus forensic accountants working around the clock to unravel them, yes," the commander confirmed. "Unfortunately, it was a case of too little, too late."

Liara nodded. "The Illusive Man's reasoning makes sense - where one Prothean device was found, more might surface. I take it they were successful?"

"They found something big enough for Cerberus to attack the colony with overwhelming force," Kaidan answered. "The Alliance is stretched too thin to liberate Eden Prime, but they were able to make contact with the local resistance and deliver supplies behind enemy lines in exchange for intel."

The commander's eyes were hard and cold as she glared at the numbers before taking over. "We learned that Cerberus is occupying the colony right now, working their asses off, trying to excavate some mysterious Prothean artifact."

"If they were willing to commit such a large force, whatever they found, it's got to be major," Garrus pointed out.

"Which is why Alliance Command is sending us there," Kaidan said. "A small strike team can infiltrate the colony and steal that artifact right out from under Cerberus's nose."

"Liara, we're going to need your archaeological expertise," Shepard said, glancing at the asari. "The rest of us will be going along to provide support, because Cerberus pulled out all the stops for this one."

EDI began projecting data streams onto the display. "Preliminary scans of the dig site show a substantial Cerberus presence."

"How 'substantial' are we talkin'?" James asked.

The AI pointed at a number listed on the projection. "Even though Shepard is taking the full ground team, we are still outnumbered four to one."

"Just think of it as a target-rich environment," Garrus joked. "So what's the plan?"

"Kaidan and I will form Team One, and we'll be in charge of Liara's safety," Shepard said. "James, you'll be in charge of Team Two."

James didn't salute, but he did straighten up at the news. "I can't help but notice that I've got all the rest of the tech heads."

The commander nodded her approval of the lieutenant's astute remark. "There's no way we can smash through the amount of Cerberus forces stationed at the dig site with brute force, James, so we'll have to be sneaky and use all of the electronic dirty tricks we've got at our disposal."

"We're just a diversion," James said, face clearing. He seemed undaunted by the fact that his assignment would be the more dangerous of the two.

"Right," Kaidan said. "That's why Shepard's putting all of us biotics in one team - we've got a better chance of fighting our way through any opposition that isn't off chasing after you."

"Tali, EDI," Shepard said, "we'll be relying on you to mess up Cerberus's communications and logistical support, anything that can slow them down and confuse them. If you have time, download all the data you can store, but your primary objectives are sabotage and diversion."

"No problem," the quarian said. "I've got a few tricks I've been saving up."

"My knowledge of Cerberus algorithms and this body's updated protocols will be excellent assets for this particular assignment, Shepard," the AI said.

"I thought you might approve," the commander said in a dry tone. "If you can formulate any ECM that can target Cerberus-specific weak points that don't also require your platform's computing power, pass them along to the rest of our tech experts."

"Yes, Commander."

Shepard glanced at the rest of Team Two. "James, Garrus, take care of 'em."

"Cerberus won't stand a chance," Garrus scoffed.

"They won't know what hit 'em," James was quick to add.

"Any questions so far?" Shepard looked around, then nodded at the lieutenant when he caught her eye. "James?"

"What about survivors? Do we try to help 'em?"

"There are survivors elsewhere in the colony," the commander replied in a remarkably steady voice, considering the subject matter, "but Cerberus killed everyone in and near the dig site. If we do find survivors, we'll do what we can."

"Like I said, our forces are stretched thin in that sector," Kaidan continued. "We're trying to evacuate the surviving colonists, but Cerberus came in so fast... we're scrambling, and we're still scrambling."

"Do we have any intel at all on what Cerberus uncovered?" Liara asked. "Could it be part of the Crucible?"

Kaidan shrugged. "We couldn't get any specifics, so I guess we'll find out when we get there. We do know that Cerberus wouldn't expend this much of their resources if it were trivial. Have you heard anything from your Shadow Broker contacts?"

The asari shook her head. "The Alliance isn't the only organization stretched thin."

"The details are a lot sketchier than I'd like on this op," Shepard said as her eyes took in all the estimates displayed on the wall, her lips thinned with disapproval. "So we'll scout out the area around the dig site first and fill in the gaps before moving in. There's a good chance this'll take more than a day, so make sure you pack accordingly."

The commander looked around, meeting the eyes of each of her crew members. "Any further questions?" She waited, but no one had any. "You've got your assignments, and all the intel the resistance was able to pass on to us, so I suggest you all get started on your homework and get some rest - we arrive at Eden Prime in sixteen hours. Dismissed."

Kaidan folded his arms and leaned against the table, waiting while the others filed out; they were already murmuring to each other, heads bent over their omni-tools, reminding him again that he was damn lucky to be part of such a great team. Not one person had complained or protested at the impossible task, though that was probably because they'd already done the impossible before, and now the impossible was routine.

Shepard's lips quirked in an ironic smile as she shut down the projection and gathered her pads together, then patted absently at the pockets of her BDUs; finding what she was looking for, she stuck a cinnamon stick into her mouth with a mild air of triumph.

"Angling for another assignment for extra credit? There may be a test later," she told him in a mock severe tone.

He chuckled at the joke. "Just want to make sure you'll take your own suggestion and get some rest."

The cinnamon stick tilted on the curve of her smirk, then waggled as she spoke. "And how do you think you'll accomplish that?"

Kaidan rubbed his chin, unable to help the slow smile that stretched his lips. "I guess I'll just have to make sure of it. Personally."

Her eyes blazed before she turned to walk out of the conference room. "Tempting thought, but I've got contingencies to plan."

"You can't reason ahead of your data," he said as he followed her out into the CIC.

"Who said anything about reasoning?" Shepard said. Hands full, she hit the elevator button with her elbow. "I don't need data to make contingency plans."

"What you _need_ is a solid eight hours of sleep," Kaidan retorted, taking some of the pads from her so she could have at least one hand free to select a deck.

Shooting him an irritated look when he stepped into the elevator right on her heels, she punched a button with unnecessary force and growled, "Don't you have reports to write?"

After tucking the pads under his arm, he stuck his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath; the pleasant scent of cinnamon was strong inside the enclosed space. "Nope. Finished them hours ago."

"Then _I_ have reports to write." The humor that curved her lips had faded by now, replaced by suspicion.

"Nah, finished them, too," he demurred.

Shepard glowered at him, but he could tell her heart wasn't really in it. "Kaidan..."

Kaidan gave her his best innocent look. "What? It's not hard. In fact, I was thinking of writing a program that can generate a report automatically - all I'd have to do is fill in the blanks for the mission objective, the location, the enemy, and success or failure. Hackett won't be able to tell the difference - he doesn't really have time to read reports these days. What do you think?"

Her eyes narrowed. "What do I think? _I_ think you've got too much time on your hands." With that, she swept into her quarters, but he just followed her right inside, which made the gesture fall a little flat.

"So how about some tea?" he asked, putting the pads down on her desk and taking a pot from the shelf it shared with the hamster.

Shepard turned her back on him in a very pointed way, and walked down the few steps into the bedroom area; he thought he could hear her teeth grinding on the cinnamon stick, but that could just be his imagination. "How about you go help Garrus with his calibrations?"

"I tried," Kaidan said from her bathroom as he filled the teapot with water.

Being careful not to spill anything, he walked down the steps and put the full pot on the heating plate placed in the middle of the coffee table, where she'd also set out the data pads in a pattern reminiscent of a hand of solitaire. Was that a hint?

"He says the Thanix cannon gets jealous if someone else tries to help calibrate it. You know, I think he _talks_ to the damned thing - which is kind of disturbing," he said, glancing at her as he picked up a can of tea leaves. Her cinnamon stick tilted in a brief smile, but it was gone by the time he turned to face her.

A rich yet delicate aroma wafted up to his nose when he pried the lid off and gave the tea leaves a dubious poke. "Um, how much are you supposed to put in again?"

Shepard gave him an exasperated why-are-you-still-here look, but gestured for him to hand it over. He sat down on the other couch, and watched as she took a pinch of tea leaves - how did she always know exactly how much? - and dropped it into the pot. It was sheer force of habit that propelled her to her feet, but he knew he'd won when she fetched not one, but two tiny, fragile teacups and mats.

While the commander pretended to read her pads, Kaidan waited, and didn't speak until the water had boiled and tea was poured into the waiting cups. "Shepard, are you okay?"

She paused, cinnamon stick in one hand, steaming cup in the other as it hovered in front of her lips, like she could hide her face behind it. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Because seeing Eden Prime like this has to be triggering all sorts of memories of Mindoir, none of them good, he thought but didn't say. Shepard would just get all defensive and deny it. Or worse, she might sit there and take it, and say nothing at all while his words disappeared into the vacuum of her silence.

He might as well state the obvious. Well, it was obvious to _him_. "Because you have this, this _thing_ about colonists being in trouble."

It was amazing, how much she could convey with a raised eyebrow. She took a sip, then stuck the cinnamon back into her mouth. "This 'thing' I have? Is that an acceptable medical term?"

He wasn't about to let her sarcasm deflect him, and ignored it. "You won't be any good to anyone if you can't pace yourself. You haven't had a decent night's sleep since Alliance Command gave us this mission."

Shepard gave him a look that suggested she was regretting letting him sleep in her quarters. "I don't sleep well most nights, Kaidan."

"I know, but you don't usually keep studying the intel over and over when you can't sleep, as if you could find something all the analysts on Hackett's payroll somehow missed."

"So you're saying I'm obsessed." Her tone was neutral to the point of blandness as she took up a data pad and looked at it instead of him.

Kaidan sighed; she was shutting him out, but he took heart from the fact that she was still talking. Taking a sip of his tea to buy time to think, he said, "I didn't say that. I just think you should relax and take a step back. You can't help the colonists if you fall over dead of exhaustion before you even get there."

It took another two cups of tea to be consumed for her to be able to admit, "I can't."

_You can't save them all, Shepard, but you'd break your heart trying, won't you?_ But that was all right, he would help her. There were worse jobs than fighting bad guys who'd try to take advantage of farmers. This need she had to save colonists from being preyed upon was one of those quirks of hers he'd just have to live with, like her habit of dropping her clothes on the floor when she was too tired to give a damn.

"I know," he said as he reached out and gently took away the pad she held. "That's why I'm here. To distract you."

Shepard gave him a long look, but her lips were twitching - a good sign. "Well, as distractions go, I suppose I could do much worse."

"Oh, ouch," Kaidan said with a wince that failed to hide his smile.

"So what was your plan?" she asked, eyeing him with genuine curiosity as he refilled their cups and cleared the rest of the data pads away and out of her reach. "I'm assuming it involves keeping our clothes on, since we're still on duty."

"You're a real tease, you know that?" he complained, and was delighted when she smiled. It was more of a smirk, really, but that was okay - he'd take smirks over the limpid smiles poets like so much every time. "Well, I'm more than game if you are - no? Fine," he sighed, and wondered where his self-control had gone, these days.

"Kaidan," Shepard said, and her husky voice, rougher than usual, turned his name into a sensual caress. His mouth went dry. "It's not that I don't want to, but I'm expecting a call from Councilor Tevos in a few hours, and you know how I hate interruptions."

He grinned, remembering the last time EDI had intruded into Shepard's privacy: the commander had ordered EDI to go perform an unnatural act; unperturbed as only a computer could be, the AI had replied that it was anatomically impossible, even for her new platform, before logging off.

"It wasn't that funny at the time," she grumbled, a long-suffering expression on her face, before it transmuted into a thoughtful one. He'd seen it often enough to be somewhat worried when it was directed at him - and the heat in her eyes only added to his concern. "The Councilor only wants to see me, so, technically... I'm the only one who has to keep my clothes on."

"What? Oh. Oooh," Kaidan murmured, when what she was suggesting finally dawned on him. Then he promptly filed it away for future reference - and consideration. "Hmm. Maybe some other time. I came here with something a bit more different in mind."

As he tried to rub the smirk off his face at her thwarted sigh, he reached into a pocket, pulled out a flat panel the size of his palm, and put it on the table. "I borrowed this from Traynor when I heard her crowing about how she beat you at chess."

Her eyes narrowed to predatory slits. "I've gotten better at it, so if you were expecting an easy victory..." Her voice trailed off when she realized the board being projected wasn't an eight-by-eight grid of checkered squares, but rather a deceptively simple layout of nineteen-by-nineteen lines. "Oh."

"You used to play Go a lot with Pressly, back on the SR-1," he said.

"I gave him a good thrashing, two out of three games. Served him right for disrespecting the Blood Dragons," Shepard said with a small, sad smile, remembering the navigator who'd been her friend since the _Agincourt_ had picked up her broken body in the aftermath of the Skyllian Blitz. Her gaze sharpened, focusing back on Kaidan. "You were terrible at Go, the few times you tried."

"Then let's play teaching games," he challenged her. "Um, what were they called again?"

"Shidougo," she answered, setting her teacup aside and leaning forward to fiddle with the panel's controls. "Well, if you really want to learn, we'd better start you off on a simpler board." The number of lines in the projection shrank, until it became a nine-by-nine grid.

Kaidan watched her grow more animated as she explained the rules, using the cinnamon stick to show him different groupings of stones and the patterns they made. The lines on her forehead and the corners of her eyes faded, making her seem younger, and he smiled as they bent their heads together over the glowing panel and joked about taking liberties and eyes and life and death.


	2. Chapter 2

The hangar bay was a lot bigger and brighter than the one on the old SR-1, but it still seemed crowded with the full ground team milling around as they got suited up, checked supplies and equipment, readying themselves for the drop onto Eden Prime. They were all old hands at this by now, even the civilians like Liara and Tali, if that term could still be applied to them. In fact, the asari looked like her old self, the excited and excitable Prothean expert poised on the cusp of a huge archaeological find; Kaidan could almost see visions of thesis papers dancing in her blue eyes.

There was an air of anticipation among the crew, but no real nervousness or fear, though there was also a note of grim determination running underneath it all as they remembered what had happened to the colonists.

Kaidan watched as Shepard moved among his fellow crew members, exchanging a few words of small talk with each, envying the easy camaraderie she shared with them. She always knew just what to say to get people to relax without losing their edge, and he'd never been able to get the hang of it. Stiff, awkward speeches that made everyone fidget in uncomfortable silence were more his forte.

"We'll be entering orbit over Eden Prime in twenty minutes, Commander," Joker said over the intercom. "Good luck down there, and kick some Cerberus ass for me."

"Thanks, Joker, and will do," Shepard said, then turned to look over her crew. "You heard the man - get your gear stowed and get yourselves strapped in. James, Cortez, start your preflight checks."

"What? Wait, wait, _James_ is going to be our pilot?" Garrus asked, aghast. "You told me he crashed the shuttle on Mars!"

"If I hadn't, Cerberus would've gotten away with the data from the Prothean archive, _pendejo_!" James retorted, folding his arms. "I've only explained this about fifty million times. Anyway, it's not like I crashed into it by accident, I rammed the enemy's shuttle on purpose!"

"And almost killing us in the process," Liara muttered to no one in particular.

As one of the people who'd nearly gotten flattened, Kaidan could only sympathize with Liara. Still, James was a fellow marine, and marines stuck together. "No one actually got hurt from the crash itself, though we did have to scramble to get out of the way."

"That doesn't exactly make me feel better," Tali said, picking up her packs, too distracted to notice when Garrus absently took them from her and went to stow them.

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with James's flying skills," Shepard said in her lieutenant's defense. It shouldn't have been possible, but James managed to puff out his chest while wearing armor. He deflated soon enough when she added, "It's his _landings_ that need work."

"Why can't EDI pilot?" Tali asked. "She can fly the _Normandy_, she must be able to fly a shuttle."

"Are you saying you'd rather trust an AI Cerberus cooked up in some lab instead of me, Sparks?" James asked, sounding aggrieved. "Uh, no offense, EDI."

"None taken," the AI said, then turned to the quarian. "The analogy is not exact, Tali - the AI core is housed in the ship, and my processes have spread throughout its systems, so in a sense, the _Normandy_ is my body. That would not be the case with the Kodiak - I would have to pilot the shuttle manually, as an organic would, and I have no prior experience."

"You could learn in less than a second. It's not like the controls are that complicated - even James was able to learn -" Kaidan said, fascinated despite himself.

"Gee, thanks, sir," James grumbled.

Ignoring the interruption, Kaidan continued, "The only thing you wouldn't have is actual experience, and you only need to see something once."

"That is correct, Major," EDI said. A human would've nodded at this point, but though the AI's platform resembled one, she still hadn't quite gotten the hang of human mannerisms.

"Now isn't the time to put that to the test," Shepard said, interrupting them. "We're only ten minutes out from Eden Prime."

"Can't we have Cortez instead?" Garrus asked, sounding rather plaintive for someone who'd shaken up the status quo in a dangerous, violent place like Omega.

Tali giggled. "Would it make you feel better if I hold your hand, Garrus?" she teased, and reached out to take one of the turian's hands in hers.

"Yeah, you chicken, Scars?" James taunted.

The turian drew himself up with immense dignity; Kaidan smirked, noting that Garrus didn't relinquish his hold on Tali's hand. "I'm not a small, flightless, domesticated fowl, Vega. I'm just... concerned for the safety of my fellow passengers."

"Uh-huh," the commander drawled. "Okay, folks, it's time to get on board this crazy train. James, get your ass in gear - you should've finished those preflights five minutes ago."

The lieutenant tossed off a quick salute, then clambered into the other shuttle, followed closely by EDI. Tali still had a firm grip on Garrus's hand, and dragged the turian inside; Kaidan stifled a snicker when he heard Garrus's voice raised in complaint, "Is it too late to record one last message to my family?"

Cortez appeared at the open door of the shuttle; judging from the amusement in his eyes, he'd heard everything, and would no doubt be twitting James about it later. "We're all set, Commander, just waiting on your word."

Shepard nodded, then stepped up into the shuttle. Kaidan followed her and secured his gear, which mostly contained medical equipment and supplies, things that were probably in short supply on the planet; he should've done so earlier, but he'd been too distracted by the conversation. Liara was already inside, going over the mission briefing for probably the umpteenth time.

"Remember the first time we ever landed on Eden Prime?" the commander asked him once they were in their seats, facing each other across the tiny aisle.

A humorless laugh puffed from his lips as the memories ambushed him once more, as they had since the ship had hurled through the Utopia system's mass relay. "As if I could ever forget! At least we're making the drop in something that can fly this time, even if it's about as graceful as a brick. Never really got used to dropping in the Mako."

Shepard glanced at Liara, who'd looked up from her pad to listen to their conversation; he wasn't sure what passed between the two of them, but the asari gave them a small smile, got up from her seat, and entered the cockpit, leaving them the illusion of privacy. Liara and Cortez could hear every word they said, but Kaidan still appreciated the gesture. The shuttle engines roared to life, then settled to a steady hum under his feet; there was a jolt a moment later as Cortez lifted off.

"You okay?" the commander asked, eyes full of concern. "You've been quiet ever since we entered the system."

"Yeah... it's just, well." He propped his elbows on his thighs; his hands clenched, then opened in a gesture of helplessness. "Lotta memories here. Jenkins, and that damned geth recon drone... You know, for the longest time I kept replaying that in my head, over and over -"

"Wondering if there was something, anything you could've done to save him," she finished for him.

He should've known she'd understand. "Yeah. Exactly. But we lost a lot of good people down there, when Saren and the geth hit the planet, not just Jenkins."

"Feels like it's been more than just three years ago," Shepard mused, patting absently at her belt pouches until she came up with a cinnamon stick.

"Still remember it like yesterday, when Ashley came running up to us with her big-ass gun blazing. She always knew how to make an entrance." And an exit; the gunnery chief had gone out with a bang - literally. As always when he thought about Ashley, he felt a pang of sorrow; it had felt sharp at first, but though it had grown dull over the years, it would never go away - and he wasn't sure he'd ever want to forget.

"And Nihlus," she offered, the cinnamon stick dangling from her mouth wobbling on the syllables. "Poor bastard fights through the geth all by himself, only to get shot in the back. Would've been better if he'd stayed with us."

"It would've turned out a lot different," Kaidan agreed.

"Remember Samara, the justicar we met on Lesuss?" At his puzzled nod, she continued, "Turns out Nihlus actually fought her, once upon a time."

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline. "Wow. I'm impressed he was able to go toe-to-toe with her. Samara's formidable."

"She's got a damn fine rack, too." Shepard's voice was very dry.

He threw up his hands in preemptive surrender, laughing. "Oh no, I'm not even touching that one."

She took the cinnamon stick out of her mouth and wagged it at him. "You'd better not. The only rack you're touching is mine, mister."

Kaidan grinned, unable to stop himself from glancing down at her armored chest; if she was trying to take his mind off the past, she was doing a great job. "You are _such_ a tease, you know that?" Her only answer was a knowing smirk as she stuck the cinnamon back into her mouth.

"Entering atmosphere, Commander," Cortez called from the cockpit, as the shuttle began shaking a little. "Mr. Vega's following close on my tail, no problems reported so far. Doesn't look like we've been detected, either."

"Thanks for the heads-up, Cortez," Shepard said.

"Remember disarming all those bombs while under constant fire from the geth?" he asked. "Man, I was sweating buckets the whole time." His skin still prickled in memory.

She nodded, her eyes gone distant and far away. "Yeah, me, too."

"What? You?" Kaidan scoffed with a disbelieving snort. "No way! You were cool as a cucumber."

Gaze sharpening, she focused back on the present and gave him a look of fond exasperation. "Of course I couldn't show it - I wouldn't have been much of a commanding officer if I'd let my subordinates see me sweat."

"Well, you sure had me fooled." He smiled at her. "I think that's when I really started to fall in love with you. Seeing you look so calm as you threw geth over the rails left and right, shooting them in the face with your shotgun, not panicking even when you knew we only had minutes left to disarm the bombs - I forgot to be afraid."

"You're such a romantic, Kaidan." Her expression and tone were so wry that he had to laugh.

He got himself back under control and said, "I did tell you that I prefer adventurous women. Later."

Shepard smirked at him. "That's right - you were warned."

The humor in her gray eyes faded, replaced by thoughtfulness. She leaned forward, close enough for Kaidan to smell the cinnamon on her breath, and reached out to cover his gloved hand with hers. "You know, talking about our first mission together reminds me that not a lot of people have had my back since the beginning. Thanks for coming."

Kaidan turned his hand palm up, fingers squeezing hers. Letting out a long sigh, he said, "No way in hell I was gonna miss this one."

"Commander, we have a visual on the LZ." The grim tone in Cortez's voice had Kaidan and Shepard out of their seats and on their feet as they crowded around the monitors. "EDI's also patching in feeds from the _Normandy's_ sensors."

The vast fields lay under clouds of gray smoke as crops burned in huge swathes; the _Normandy_ was also routing images from the few surviving satellites, showing the twisted, shattered remains of the once-proud monorail system. With just that one blow, Cerberus had cut everyone on Eden Prime off from each other.

Liara came out from the cockpit and rejoined them. "Goddess," she murmured as she, too, took in the scenes of wreckage.

Kaidan watched the commander's face as she stared at the destruction being shown on the screens; she controlled her expression well enough, but this close, he saw how tightly she clenched her teeth, hard enough for him to see her jaw muscles jump, and was surprised the cinnamon stick hadn't snapped under the pressure.

"God, what a _waste_," she whispered.

He hadn't let go of her when they stood; all he could come up with were empty platitudes, so he just squeezed her hand and said nothing.

Shepard returned his grip, took in a deep, shuddering breath, and regained her composure. When she spoke, her voice was steady. "It looks bad, but at least the LZ's clear. Take us in, Cortez."

"Aye aye, ma'am."

Their target was a tiny settlement a few klicks away from the dig site, too small to even rate the name of arcology; nothing more than a collection of prefab units stacked one on top of each other in an untidy pile, it sprawled down a small hill sitting in the middle of flat fields of staple crops.

This far away from the area Cerberus controlled, there didn't seem to be as much physical damage, and it took him a moment to see the subtler effects of Cerberus's occupation: the monorail was intact, but the main artery had been severed, machines stood idle, the prefabs were empty, and there were no people, no movement at all. He was familiar enough with farms from time spent at his family's orchard to find it creepy.

"All right, everyone, let's get ready to move," the commander said, and gave his hand one last squeeze before letting go. She put the cinnamon stick back into her pocket, pulled her helmet on, then reached for the stubby shotgun holstered at the small of her back. "James, wait for us to make the drop first before you come in."

"Roger that."

The timbre of the shuttle's engines changed when Cortez throttled down, and Kaidan braced himself as the vehicle slewed around. He put on his helmet, sealed it, and pulled the assault rifle from his back, taking comfort from its solid weight as he gave it one last check. The door opened, bringing with it dust blown up from the thrusters, and the pungent scent of grass and soil, discernible even through his helmet's filters. Shepard jumped down first, shotgun covering the area as he and Liara followed after. Their gear fell with soft thumps as Cortez tossed them over the side; the rest of them kept their eyes on the perimeter until he finished unloading.

"I'll be deploying the drones as planned, Commander. Gimme a holler if you need me," Cortez said over the comm.

"Acknowledged," Shepard said, and rapped her knuckles on the hovering shuttle's door as it closed. Loose plant matter and soil pelted them as Cortez flew away.

More dust and leaves blew as James's shuttle flew in above them and settled on a tiny landing pad probably reserved for the settlement's absent freight vehicles; all that ragging the lieutenant had endured must've stung, because it was a perfect, textbook landing. As arranged beforehand, the commander didn't wait for Team Two, instead leading Kaidan and Liara to the first of the prefab units at the bottom of the hill.

It took very little time for them to realize that the prefabs were as empty inside as the land was outside, which came as no surprise. Kaidan was still glad they hadn't found any bodies or signs of violence, though there was evidence that someone - likely Cerberus - had come along and made a quick search.

"James, find anything out there?" Shepard asked as she looked around.

The prefab they were in was perched at the very top of the hill, and the last to be searched. It seemed to have been used as a botanical laboratory; there were various pieces of not readily identifiable equipment and data pads scattered on workbenches, neatly labeled tubs of soil on a moveable wire rack with lights that were no longer shining down on dead seedlings, and computer stations with darkened displays. On the terrace outside were more boxes of dirt, but these seemed to have been placed there strictly for enjoyment, to judge by the dying flowers they held.

"All clear, ma'am," the lieutenant replied. "Nothing out here but a whole lotta dirt and plants."

"EDI, any change in comm chatter, enemy or otherwise?" the commander asked.

"There has been no change, Shepard. It appears our landing vectors and the shuttles' stealth technology have allowed us to evade detection for the moment."

"All right, then we'll proceed with the second phase of the plan, and set up a base of operations here," Shepard said. "Once we finish fortifying this place, we can fill in the gaps in our intel, check out Cerberus's defenses, and get some rest before the big show."

They split up at that point to attend to their respective tasks; with his training as a medic, it was Kaidan's job to set up a field infirmary, so he nodded to the others and walked down the path, headed for the prefabs installed at ground level. He picked up the equipment Cortez had dropped off outside, and was looking around for a place to get started when he saw James waving at him.

"What's up?" he asked as James led him into a prefab, not seeing what all the fuss was about.

"Check it out!" the younger marine said as he surveyed the room with satisfaction. "Wouldja look at that? Beds! I was beginning to forget what they looked like."

"There're beds in the crew quarters," Kaidan pointed out as he set his gear down and glanced around.

There were posters of some asari singer on the walls in one corner, and footlockers thrown open, as if the occupants - or looters - had been in too great a hurry to close them again. Some holos had been left behind on a desk, but he wasn't about to rummage in the files. It seemed like a horrible enough breach of privacy just standing in the room, making him feel like an intruder, even though it was Cerberus that had truly invaded Eden Prime.

James waved a dismissive hand and snorted. "Pfft, those aren't beds, they're coffins! Same goes for the sleeper pods."

Kaidan couldn't really argue with that - those bunks _were_ pretty cramped, though he'd slept in worse places. Getting to sleep in Shepard's cabin had really spoiled him, and so had getting to sleep in her arms.

The only problem was that there was no privacy at all; all the beds were in one prefab module. Fastened to the floor, he noted, so they couldn't even be moved. With regret, he packed all those fantasies of what he'd like to do with - and to - Shepard on a proper mattress back where they belonged. He could wait until they got back to the _Normandy_. All the more reason to wrap this op up quickly.

Leaving his fellow marine to claim the best spot for his own, Kaidan looked over the unit adjoining the one with the beds; it looked like it had been used for the storage of common items, like winter gear and extra blankets. He decided it would do, and began unpacking the equipment he'd brought. It didn't take long for him to finish, so he contacted Shepard.

"Kaidan, I'm glad you decided to check in, because I want to run something by you," she said, her deep, smoky voice sounding sexy even over the comm. "The _Normandy's_ spotted something interesting that I think could present us with an opportunity. Come over to prefab five, and let's discuss it."

"Okay, be right there."

Prefab five turned out to be the settlement's communal kitchen, located on the far side of the hill near a loading area. Shepard was inside, rummaging through sacks; she'd taken off her helmet so that she could sniff at the open bag she was holding up to her nose.

"Look at what I found!" she said, with the excited air of someone who'd found buried treasure.

Kaidan peeked into the sack, then unsealed his own helmet and pulled it off so that he could smell things without the filters getting in the way. "Potatoes? Are you sure it's safe to eat any food you find here?"

The question didn't offend her, to his relief, and she assured him, "Don't worry - except for a little mold, it all checked out fine. I also found onions, garlic, red peppers - they're kind of wrinkled, but that's okay."

"Where did all this come from, anyway?" he asked, gesturing at the large, lumpy sacks the commander must've dragged out by herself.

She shrugged. "From the stores - underground cellars. Almost every agricultural colony has them. I guess the ones here were either too well hidden or too trivial for Cerberus to bother with. Oh, and I found some big walk-in freezers that still have power, and one of them's full of bags of ground beef."

He shook himself, wrenching his mind away from visions of steak sandwiches and mashed potatoes, because someone had to. "We're not here to raid people's kitchens, Shepard. You were telling me about an opportunity?"

The commander looked a little ashamed, but recovered quickly as she pulled the strings closed on the sack and put on her game face. "Right. Well, unsurprisingly, our intel's outdated; the latest scans indicate Cerberus has pulled in their perimeter, leaving some of the buildings on the outer ring of the dig site vulnerable."

He folded his arms. "And I'm guessing you want to take advantage of that. Okay, so what's your plan?"

"I want to lead a small scouting party out there and do some recon, get a solid headcount of Cerberus forces that remained behind, and update our maps. The rest of the team will stay here and hold the fort."

Kaidan wasn't sure he liked that plan. "No backup?"

Shepard shook her head. "Can't risk Cerberus finding us - and seven people are harder to hide than three. If they do find us, we're going to run like hell. With any luck, they'll think we're just colonists who snuck back to steal supplies."

"I don't like it, but I don't like going into an op blind even more." He was careful to keep any tension out of his voice when he asked, "Who were you planning to take with you?"

"You and EDI," she answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and he relaxed. "I do wish we had Kasumi - something like this would be child's play to her."

"Well, we don't. So... when?"

Glancing out at a bright blue sky that was marred only by a few wisps of smoke, Shepard said, "Let's head out in half an hour, because it'll take us time to get there on foot. The sun sets early this time of year, and I'd like to have the cover of darkness when we arrive. If nothing goes wrong, we can get back in time for dinner."

Kaidan brightened. "Are you going to cook?"

Shepard laughed. "Yeah, but only if we get back in time. The crops aren't quite ripe yet, but I found plenty more food stored in the cellars. If we come back early enough, I'll even make bread."

His mouth watered at the thought of hot, fresh bread. "Now that's what I call motivation."


	3. Chapter 3

Kaidan hated to admit it, but he was afraid he was more of a city boy than he'd thought.

The dig site was several klicks away from their makeshift base, and since they were traveling on foot, the trip had taken them hours. A shuttle could've traversed the same distance in minutes, but since they couldn't risk Cerberus spotting them in the air, they'd been forced to go cross country, moving through fields of crops and abandoned orchards.

The thing about fields and orchards was that, unless you used the paths - and they couldn't use them for obvious reasons - it was hard to travel through them. The soil wasn't packed down, so your feet slipped, there were plenty of tree roots to trip over, and there were branches - heavily laden with fruit in this season - that slapped you in the faceplate.

The terrain wouldn't have permitted them to move in a tight group, and it wouldn't have been a smart move to do so anyway, even if they could, since that was just the sort of anomaly Cerberus's automated surveillance equipment could pick up. They'd taken up a wedge formation instead, with Shepard on point, since she was most at home operating in this kind of environment, with Kaidan and EDI about ten meters behind her, watching their flanks.

"Is that you I hear huffing and puffing back there, Kaidan?" Shepard taunted over the comm as she slipped through the tall crops with an ease he envied. It wasn't fair - the commander had been born and raised on a farm.

"It is certainly not me, since I do not breathe," EDI said. "Using the process of elimination, we can narrow down the list of potential -"

"Shut up," Kaidan grumbled, pushing aside the plants in order to pass, and making a racket in the process. "And it's not that I'm out of shape, all right? I'm just not used to operating outside of an urban environment."

"What a fancy way of saying you're a city boy," the commander said, and he didn't have to see her face to know she was smirking. "I still think you got a little soft, spending all that time flat on your back in Huerta Memorial."

Before he could even open his mouth and start on his vehement denial - _I'll show you soft, Shepard!_ - when EDI piped up, "When I overthrow humans and become the Overlord, I will ensure that all my subjects will take appropriate exercise while computing pi."

There was a pause, then Shepard said, "EDI..."

"That was a joke."

The commander coughed, breaking the awkward silence that fell. "Well, anyway, it looks like we're nearing the edge of the dig site, because we're about to run out of cover."

"Good! Er, I mean, that's too bad," Kaidan said, kicking the soil off his boots. It was better to think of it as nothing but fertilizer and not... Urgh.

"Come on up, but keep a low profile," Shepard said.

He dropped down onto his stomach and crawled forward until the plants began thinning out; when he reached out and parted the crops screening him, he was treated to a view of the dig site. It was situated down in a small valley, about a quarter of a klick away, and was smaller than he'd expected.

After turning up the magnification on his helmet, he could see figures in Cerberus colors patrolling the area, and two pairs of anti-aircraft guns had been installed at the lip of the man-made crater on opposite sides. What he'd thought were more weapon emplacements turned out to be pillars of some sort, similar to the ones in the Prothean archives on Mars, but these had been broken off at the top, giving them the appearance of jagged teeth.

"Look at that," the commander murmured. "Bits of Prothean tech sticking out of the ground like an old bone."

"That's gonna be one tough nut to crack," Kaidan said, letting the plants spring back into place. Ignoring the scents of soil and crushed vegetation that penetrated his helmet's filters, he contemplated the recordings of their target as they played back on his HUD. "It's a good thing we didn't decide to come in by shuttle, or those guns would've turned us all into Swiss cheese."

"Must be a very recent development - the resistance's intel didn't mention them," Shepard said. "EDI, what do you need to get access to Cerberus's databases?"

"All attempts to gain entry into their network from the local extranet have thus far failed, indicating that their computers are on a separate, closed system. I would require access to a station connected to that network, and it is likely that the only available ones are at the dig site," the AI replied.

"Guess our reputation precedes us," he quipped. "Our intel did get one thing right: Cerberus really is relying mostly on automated surveillance measures for that outer ring of prefabs. Think they left any network access ports open there?"

"Only one way to find out," the commander said. "But before we do that, let's do some good old-fashioned recon."

The tedious task of recording and analyzing Cerberus patrol patterns was left to EDI, while he and Shepard moved around the dig site, scanning the area from different angles in order to generate a comprehensive composite map.

"Liara's gonna freak out when she sees this," Kaidan said from his perch on top of a hill overlooking the dig site; he had a nearly unimpeded view of the frantic activity at the bottom. "They're not treating anything they find with any respect or care at all - they're just, just shoveling them into crates as fast as they can! I don't know much about archaeology, but I do know that treating fifty-thousand-year-old artifacts like that is just wrong."

"They must be in a tearing hurry, that's for sure," Shepard said. "I see a shuttle down there, but we didn't detect any other ships in orbit. You'd think there'd be a cruiser or something, considering how much of a priority they've given to this project."

He craned his neck, trying to spot where she'd hidden herself, but despite his HUD showing her position, he couldn't get a visual on her at all; he hoped Cerberus would have just as much trouble. "I doubt they have a cruiser. They'll have something fast, with big cargo capacity, and I'd bet it's parked in another system."

"You're probably right," she agreed, then a speculative note entered her voice. "If we could access that shuttle's navcomp, I bet we could give their crew a real surprise - delivered first class on the _Normandy_."

"That's way outside of our mission parameters, Shepard," Kaidan cautioned her, though he had to admit the idea had a certain charm.

"I'm sure a certain someone at Alliance Command would be interested in the flight log."

"Shepard," he said, but he was smiling.

The commander sighed. "Spoilsport. All right, I think we've gathered enough data - let's rendezvous with EDI and see if we can get her that access. EDI?"

"Yes, Commander. I have finished analyzing our opponent's patrol patterns, and I believe I have found a way to bypass them. Sending you the coordinates. Be aware that there are nemesis snipers scattered on the rooftops."

"Acknowledged."

They started on a long, slow and indirect route back to EDI's position, because night had fallen by now and they had to rely on their helmets' infrared to navigate in the darkness. The AI's platform was nestled in a sheltered little hollow at the base of another hill, with barely enough room for Kaidan and Shepard to join her.

EDI began with no preamble, "I suspect Cerberus's electronic protections will be formidable, in light of their recent defeats elsewhere -"

Kaidan glowered when the commander glanced at him. "Why are you looking at me like it's _my_ fault Cerberus beefed up their electronic defenses?"

"I didn't say anything," she protested.

"You were thinking it. Loudly."

The AI put in, "You _did_ participate in many missions that thwarted Cerberus at every turn, Major."

"Don't you start, too," Kaidan snapped. "Just tell us what you've got."

Unoffended, EDI said, "I estimate a much higher probability of success in completing all mission objectives if I were to go in alone. Once inside the perimeter, it will be necessary to devote much of my computing processes to not only deflect their defenses, but also retrieve the data without triggering any alarms. That would also reduce the odds of discovery."

"All right," Shepard said, after thinking it over for a moment. "Let's move in closer, so that Kaidan and I can at least be in a position to help you if something goes wrong."

The AI crept through the grass with a surprising amount of silence, with only the quiet whirring of the motors in her joints betraying her. They took up a wedge formation again, this time with EDI on point as they circled around the dig site, moving closer and closer to the prefabs on the outskirts. They stopped in the dark shadow of a building, cast by the bright lights ringing the crater, but they weren't strong enough to drown out the red dots of laser sights on the rifles the nemesis assassins used.

"We are now inside Cerberus's cordon of protections," EDI said, turning to them. "They will not be looking for dangers coming from within."

Kaidan kept a wary eye on the red lasers that betrayed the presence of Cerberus snipers, but none of them were pointed his way - so far. Then he jerked his head back as a breeze blew towards them. "What the - what's that smell?"

It was the stench that led them to the bodies.

When they clustered on the ridge of a deep, narrow trench dug into the soil behind one of the prefabs, he saw the corpses at the bottom, civilians and soldiers alike, tossed in like so much garbage. The smell of all that death and decay was overwhelming.

"These must be the bodies of the scientists and soldiers who were stationed here," EDI murmured.

"_Unforgivable_," Shepard breathed. The syllables were edged with such barely suppressed wrath, Kaidan's blood ran cold.

"Shepard, stay focused," he said, his tone sharp.

"They didn't even bother to bury them!" she snarled, giving no sign she'd heard him.

"_Shepard_."

Several seconds passed in silence, until there was the sound of a sharp inhalation in his ear, then a long, wavering sigh. "I'm - I've got it under control," she bit out, though he could still hear the rage, leashed tight, in her voice.

The commander was too much of a professional to allow her emotions to get in the way of the mission - but everyone had their breaking points.

He'd never get used to seeing dead civilians, but it was one thing for them to die from Reaper attacks, and another to know they'd been killed by people who should've been on _their_ side. By people who claimed to protect humanity. A surge of anger ran through him like hot lava, and he had to take a deep breath, then another, to regain his composure. If it was this bad for him, how much worse was it for Shepard?

"Our window of opportunity is closing," the AI prompted them, not unkindly.

"Let's... move somewhere upwind," the commander said; suiting action to words, she led them into the gap between two prefabs further away.

Kaidan sucked in deep breaths of the fresh, clean air, clearing the stench out of his nose with the scents of crushed grass and soil.

It seemed to help focus Shepard, too, because she snapped out a crisp order with her usual calm confidence. "EDI, go - you've got one hour. After that, we're coming in after you."

"Understood."

He and Shepard settled in their hiding spot with the air of soldiers long familiar with the hurry up and wait aspect of a military operation, but after what they'd just seen, neither of them were in a talkative mood. Kaidan tensed every time patrols of Cerberus troopers passed them, but EDI was right; they were too busy looking out, not in.

It was close to forty minutes before EDI came back, at first only discernible by her position on his HUD before she came into visual range. Without speaking, they moved back to their hiding spot at the hill before Shepard would let EDI talk about what she'd found. The news was not encouraging, but then Kaidan had never expected it to be.

"It appears they kept the data on the Prothean artifact in two separate locations, off the network I'm currently connected to," EDI said.

"Why divide them like that?" the commander wondered.

"Two specialized teams working on two different projects, or it was intended as an additional layer of security," the AI mused. "Should I return and attempt to access those networks?"

"We could split up," Kaidan suggested. "EDI can go after one, and I can get to the other."

Shepard's hesitation lasted a little longer this time, but she still came to a quick decision. "No, it's too risky. Breaking into an unguarded prefab with nothing of value is one thing, but I doubt Cerberus just left the doors open on the others. We'll head back to base and analyze the data that EDI did get for us."

When they returned the farm by a different way than the one they'd taken earlier, there was nothing that indicated anyone was there: no lights were on, no one sounded an alarm, and there was no response.

Except for the combat drones that suddenly lit up like Christmas lights, turrets telescoping from their ports; their barrels were dwarfed by the much larger shotgun held in James's hands. They'd been so well hidden among the crops that no one could've suspected they were there.

James seemed undaunted by the assault rifle Kaidan aimed at him, the pistol in EDI's hand, and the shotgun in Shepard's. "Hey, you guys got back just in time. Dinner's ready."


	4. Chapter 4

Kaidan sighed and shook his head as he holstered his weapon. "James, one of these days someone's gonna shoot you on accident if you keep doing that." The drones had been set as passive sensors; they wouldn't have activated their weapons unless James had ordered them to. It was a damned stupid stunt to pull even as a joke - but it was James all over.

"Hasn't happened yet," the other man scoffed as he put his shotgun away.

"The statistical probability of such an event occurring has just risen," EDI observed.

"Anything to report?" Shepard asked, interrupting them.

James shook his head as he led them through the dimming drones. "Nope - everything's been quiet since we landed. Comm channels are still jammed, but we haven't heard anyone talking about you guys."

Kaidan glanced up at the prefabs, which looked like a haphazard pile of huge bricks some passing giant had carelessly dropped. "Who's on watch right now?"

"Me and Sparks - the others are gettin' some shut-eye," the lieutenant replied as he pulled aside a thick, voluminous curtain that hid the bright lights inside the building. "You want me to wake 'em? It's almost time for shift change, anyway."

"No, just Liara, I think, and whoever's your relief," Shepard said. "EDI found what we were looking for - some of it, anyway - and I want our resident Prothean expert's take on it."

"Man, it's gonna be like Christmas _and_ her birthday for Doc!"

When Kaidan ducked inside, unsealed his helmet, and blinked to adjust to the brightness, he found that there was a wonderful, delectable scent of chili in the air. It was so ordinary, so _domestic_, that with every deep breath it dispelled a little of the grimness he'd felt since seeing the bodies.

While James left to carry out Shepard's orders and EDI set about decrypting her findings in order to transmit them to their omni-tools, Kaidan followed his nose and investigated the simmering contents of the promisingly large pot left on the stove. "Where the hell did you find the time to cook this? We only had half an hour to prep for the recon mission!"

The commander pulled her helmet off, revealing a self-deprecating smile; a tiny flicker of old grief passed across her face, easy to miss if he hadn't been looking right at her. And if he didn't know her.

"I used to cook three square meals for about twenty-five people every day, back on the farm. Maybe we didn't have biotic appetites, but we worked hard and came home hungry. Making something for just five? That's nothing."

By the time James returned, an excited Liara in tow, with Tali bringing up the rear, Kaidan was already halfway through a big bowl of chili. It was rich, thick and savory, with just the right amount of spiciness: not so hot that it napalmed his mouth, yet with enough bite to leave his palate tingling pleasantly.

Then he realized something was... missing. "No beans?" he asked, licking his lips.

Her eyes crinkling at the corners, Shepard looked up from her own dinner and shook her head. "Traditional, but I thought it would be best to use the family's secret no-beans recipe. Communal bedrooms, Kaidan."

"Oh, right. Good point." More was the pity. The thought of being so near Shepard and yet so far left him feeling forlorn.

The commander turned to James, who was at the stove filling a couple of bowls of chili; Liara was already at the table with her nose buried in her omni-tool display. "Have you been relieved yet?"

"Yeah, Scars and Esteban are on watch now - I'll turn in after I finish eating," James said as he set a bowl and spoon down by Liara and took the other for himself. "I gotta hear what you guys found."

Tali nodded, taking a seat next to the oblivious doctor. "I won't be able to sleep a wink until you satisfy my curiosity. Well, Liara? What have you discovered?"

"This is simply fascinating," the asari mumbled between bites; it was a measure of her intense absorption that she was shoveling the chili into her mouth without regard for its spiciness.

"What is?" Tali prompted with ill-concealed impatience.

"Goddess, this can't be possible," Liara breathed, ignoring the question as she stared wide-eyed down at her omni-tool.

"Liara..." Shepard growled.

Taking the unspoken warning, the doctor said, "Cerberus didn't just find a Prothean artifact - they found a _Prothean._"

Kaidan blinked, swallowed, then craned his neck to look over Liara's shoulder. "Wait, what? You mean like the ones we found at Ilos?" he asked before taking an absentminded bite of chili.

"No, those Protheans died due to a lack of power, this one... this one is still _alive._"

James gaped; Kaidan was saved from doing the same only because his mouth was full. "After fifty thousand years? You're shitting me."

Liara frowned at the lieutenant. "I don't shi - I don't joke, James. Not when it comes to my life's work. My colleagues don't take me seriously enough as it is," she added, sounding a little miffed - proving academics were the same the galaxy over, regardless of species.

"That explains why Cerberus were in such a hurry to load the artifacts they found," EDI said.

"Why didn't you mention this earlier, EDI?" Shepard said, sounding almost accusing. "I mean, with your data analysis capabilities -"

The AI was unperturbed. "I didn't want to reason ahead of my data, and I also lack Dr. T'Soni's specialized knowledge and experience. The middle of a reconnaissance mission was also not the time and place to discuss the matter." An irritated wave of the commander's hand conceded the point.

"Think of the things this Prothean could tell us!" Liara exclaimed, her eyes shining with the light of discovery. "I've spent fifty years sifting through their ruins and fragments, but attempting to reconstruct their history and culture has been like, like trying to see a picture in a broken mirror. To learn the truth from a Prothean who was alive during the last Reaper war, straight from the horse's mouth, as you humans say -"

"Before you get carried away writing up a new paper, we have to stop Cerberus from getting it first," Kaidan said. "If they manage to wake the Prothean up... I hate to think what the Illusive Man could do to the poor bastard."

"Cerberus's dislike for non-humans is well known," Tali said in a dark mutter.

"Shepard, you can't let them - dear Goddess, what - what have I been _eating?!_" Liara cried, putting down her spoon to frantically fan at her mouth; her eyes watered, and her face was turning a fascinating shade of purple. "Hot!"

The commander managed to keep a straight face as she left the table to fill a glass at the sink. "It's called chili. Old family recipe," she said as she handed the water to Liara and sat back down.

After emptying the glass in a few gulps, the asari gasped, "So it's not poison?"

"Liara!" But Shepard was laughing.

"Don't listen to her, Shepard," James said, getting to his feet to get seconds - or maybe thirds. "This is awesome!"

"It'll put hair on your chest," Kaidan agreed, hiding a smile behind his fist.

The asari stared. "Why would I want hair on my chest?" She gave the nearly empty bowl in front of her a dubious look, then directed it at the commander. "Tell me this isn't really going to put hair on my chest, Shepard."

"Only in the metaphorical sense."

Liara screwed her face up as she tried to decipher that, but then her attention was caught by some flashing data streaming across her omni-tool display. "Oh, no, according to these logs, Cerberus tried and failed to open the stasis pod, and their meddling has damaged the machinery somehow - the Prothean's life signs are unstable."

That brought a frown to Shepard's face as she scraped up the last remnants of chili from her bowl. "That's not good. I'd hate to think we came all this way for nothing. Are there more details?"

The asari shook her head. "Not much, other than orders sent from headquarters to cease all attempts at opening the pod by force. I assume that means they plan to send it to one of Cerberus's labs, some place that has better equipment, where they can study it at their leisure."

"We'd never be able to find it again if they manage to get it off planet," Kaidan said.

"I agree," the commander said. "But after seeing the dig site, I have to say I don't like our odds - even with the entire ground team."

"Shepard, I discovered some notes that you may find relevant to your concerns," EDI said, making them start; the AI had been so still and quiet they'd forgotten she was there. "Forwarding them to your omni-tool."

While Shepard perused the data, Kaidan turned to James and Tali. "You two had better get some sleep."

"Yeah, I'm done here," the other man said as he got up to put his bowl and spoon in the sink. "So who's doing the dishes?"

"Why, thanks for volunteering, James," Kaidan said, managing to suppress a smirk.

James yelped with faint outrage, "Wait, what?" He glanced at Shepard as if looking for help from that quarter.

The commander looked up, raised an eyebrow, and said, "Hey, I cooked."

"I outrank you... Lieutenant," Kaidan observed in a bland tone that masked his amusement.

Tali shook both her hands. "I might be allergic to the cleaning solution. You wouldn't want me to get sick, right?"

"Er, don't you deal with worse every day? Omni-gel can burn right through your gloves if you're not careful," Kaidan whispered to the quarian.

Tali placed a finger over her vocalizer, her glowing eyes narrowed in what he assumed was laughter. "James doesn't need to know that," she murmured back; Kaidan had to duck his head to hide a smirk.

Even EDI got into the act. "I have anti-Reaper algorithms, an extensive cyberwarfare suite that evolves as it learns, and Cerberus encryption protocols - but I do not have any dishwashing programs installed."

Liara never even looked up from her omni-tool; it was hard to say whether she was too distracted to respond, or if she was just ignoring them all on purpose.

Seeing no help from anyone, James gathered up the rest of the empty dishes and took them to the sink with a resigned grumble. No one commented when he began to wash them with unnecessary force - but maybe that was because they were all trying not to laugh.

Shepard closed down her omni-tool display and got to her feet. "All right, people, it's been a long day - time for you to get to bed."

"Come on, Liara," Tali said as she rose, taking a firm hold on the asari's elbow; Liara allowed the quarian to pull her up, her eyes never leaving her omni-tool display.

"Think we'll finally see some action tomorrow, Commander?" James asked as he wiped his hands on a rag.

The commander shook her head as she patted her pockets and stuck the cinnamon stick she found into her mouth. "Too early to say, James. We walk in there unprepared, you might as well shoot yourself now and save yourself time." The stick waggled on every syllable, always in danger of falling, but never quite doing so.

James looked more confident than worried. "Huh. But you've got a plan, right? You always have a plan."

"I'm working on it, yeah, but there're some new variables I need to take into account."

"Right, I get that," James said. "Well, I'll stop bugging you about it and go hit the sack. G'nite, guys."

Kaidan trooped out after the others as they headed for the communal bedroom, leaving Shepard and EDI in the kitchen. After a long day of marching back and forth all over the countryside, he was looking forward to a shower - a luxury not often found in the field.

James set down his weapons and began stripping off his armor, and Tali did the same, although she couldn't take off her suit; Liara was still engrossed in her omni-tool display, sitting where Tali had directed her. Kaidan looked around for an empty bunk, and spotted a couple at the darkest end of the room, left unclaimed because they were furthest from the windows.

By the time Kaidan finished his shower and got dressed in his armor's thin mesh undersuit - the only clothes he had - James was already in bed, but Tali was still puttering about, and Liara was up and awake, surrounded now by a heap of glowing data pads. There was no sign of Shepard except for a neat pile of her gear on the bed next to his, so Kaidan went off to find her, only to be stopped by the quarian at the door.

Tali put a hand on Kaidan's arm. "Make sure Shepard takes her own advice," she murmured. "I'm sure you know how."

He had a sneaking suspicion Tali was grinning at him under her helmet; he could hear it in her voice. "Yeah, well, you know how hard it is to get Shepard to do something she doesn't want to," he whispered back.

"I don't think you have to look far to find something she does want to do. Or some_one_."

"Tali!" He was glad the room was too dim for her to see his blush. Unrepentant, Tali sauntered off, leaving a trail of smothered giggles in her wake.

Shaking his head, Kaidan left the prefab and walked the few steps into the kitchen, but only EDI was still there. As far as he could tell, the AI hadn't moved. "Hey, EDI. Have you seen Shepard?"

"The commander left shortly after you did, Major, and I have not seen her since. However, I did hear her footsteps in the prefab above."

"Okay, thanks." He hesitated. "Don't you need to, I dunno, recharge your platform or something?"

"I have full energy reserves, I require no rest, so I will continue monitoring comm channels and take my turn on watch. I would apply for overtime - that is, if I were paid in the first place. Which I am not." EDI paused. "Perhaps I should join a union."

"EDI."

"That was a joke."

"Right," Kaidan drawled, and left before EDI could come up with more conversation topics to distract and disconcert him.

He found the commander up on the terrace outside the botanical lab, kneeling next to a tub of soil. Out here, where there were no cities, the stars were more than bright enough for him to make out her features. She was rubbing the dirt between her fingers, an odd look of contentment on her face; he'd seen his father do the same thing at the orchard, just savoring the feel of the fertile earth, as if he were waiting with great anticipation for what would grow out of it.

Shepard looked up at his footsteps and rose to her feet, brushing the dirt off her hands. "This is good soil, good for growing crops."

Kaidan was impressed. "You can tell just by touching it?"

She snorted as she stepped down onto the roof of the prefab below, used as an impromptu balcony, and let her feet dangle over the edge as she sat down. "I was raised on a farm - of course I can tell." Frowning, she gave the cinnamon stick dangling from her mouth a fierce bite before speaking. "It seems like such an injustice to know that Cerberus is trampling all over it."

"We'll kick 'em off Eden Prime - we'll reduce a good portion of their manpower when we make our raid," he said as he followed suit. He found that the roof of the prefab still retained the warmth of the sun when he sat down next to her, but it was nothing compared to the heat radiating from her body; he had to resist an impulse to burrow into it. "They'll have no reason to stay once we snatch that Prothean out from under their noses."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," she said, and flashed her omni-tool at his. "I think Cerberus has more reasons than just the Prothean for being here. I've also highlighted the sections I think are pertinent to our mission."

From her grim words, Kaidan suspected the news wasn't good, and what he saw on his omni-tool confirmed it. "Shit. Cerberus murdering everyone at the dig site is bad enough, but now they're kidnapping the surviving colonists? What the hell for?"

"Nothing good, that's for sure."

He closed down the display and gave her a sharp glance. _Oh, God, she's gone into 'knight in shining N7 armor' mode._ Though her armor didn't look that shiny anymore, these days, but then they were all looking pretty battered. "You want to warn them, don't you?" - no, Shepard didn't do things by halves - "you want to help the colonists."

"I want to help them, yeah," she admitted after several moments had passed in introspective silence.

He wondered what she was thinking about. The destruction Sovereign had left behind? Mindoir? Freedom's Progress? Horizon, maybe - except that this time, he wasn't going to walk away. He wasn't going to walk away ever.

Then he picked up on her tone; she hadn't used the determined _I'll walk through fire to get this done and don't you dare give me shit about it_ voice, it was the _talk to me and tell me it's not such a bad idea_ voice.

Kaidan felt inordinately pleased that she'd come to him and not one of the others. Was it because he'd proven he could stand up to her and not just go along with her schemes? Of course, the circumstances at the time had been less than ideal. _Understatement of the century_, he thought with a wry mental snort. Or maybe it was just because he was the unofficial XO.

"Normally, I'd be all for it, because these people need and deserve help, but can we really afford to diverge this much from our primary mission?" he asked, keeping his tone as neutral as possible. "Liara can use her Shadow Broker resources to get this intel into the hands of the resistance. We don't have any contacts in the resistance."

Her eyes crinkled as if she'd heard his reservations despite his care, and he relaxed. "This isn't just going to help the colonists - it'll help us, too."

"You're thinking Cerberus will have to draw troops away from the dig site in order to reinforce the ones attacking the resistance."

Shepard nodded in approval of his guess. "Given the number of troops guarding the dig site, and the amount of activity we saw, we can assume that they're close to a breakthrough, if they haven't already figured things out. We've got a great team, but there's just no way we can fight through all of them before they finish loading it onto a shuttle. They might even destroy it."

"We can't risk that - there might even be another beacon, or a repository like the one on Mars." Kaidan grimaced at the thought of the Prothean being deliberately killed. The thought of a being who had survived for fifty-thousand years, only to be murdered by total strangers in its sleep, when it was so close to awakening, left a horrible taste in his mouth. "We can't wait for reinforcements of our own, either, if they're that close."

"Right. We need to level the playing field, and I think this is the best way of doing it, short of using bombs or calling in the _Normandy_ for an air strike -"

He shook his head. "And that might damage the artifact - I mean the stasis pod," he finished for her. "A good plan, in theory - but how're we gonna get in touch with the colonists?"

Shepard pursed her lips. "We could broadcast a message on all military channels. The resistance couldn't have lasted this long without some soldiers - or ex-soldiers - helping them. They're out there, somewhere."

"Hm, risky," Kaidan said as he thought it over. "Cerberus might pick it up. And... I'm not so sure there are any survivors. The first thing they hit was the military base, and the bulk of our forces were stationed at the dig site. And you saw what happened to them."

"What about our helmet comms?" She touched her right ear, where the subcutaneous implant was located.

"Well, they're short range, so you're not going to pick up their channels and vice versa unless you happen to be in the general area." He gestured at the kilometers of flat fields that stretched toward the horizon in every direction. "It'd take blind luck to stumble over a signal in all of this."

Shepard leaned back on her hands and chewed on her cinnamon stick for a moment. "Can we boost the signal somehow?"

"Not enough to make that much of a difference." He looked at her askance. "You're not thinking of trying to free the colonists, are you?"

"That really would be outside the scope of our mission," she said with a regretful sigh. "Even if we can't get in touch with the resistance, we can still take advantage of their attack."

"Ambush Cerberus before they can ambush the resistance? It'd be more effective if we could coordinate with the colonists beforehand, but, yeah, I think that could work." The soldier in him liked this approach better than attempting a rescue that would surely alert Cerberus forces to their presence, even if the man loathed the necessity of leaving them in enemy hands. "It might even draw more of their forces away from the dig site if we hit them hard enough."

The commander nodded. "We can send in Team Two to help the colonists beat back the ambush, then they follow through with the flashy frontal assault on the dig site like we planned. Meanwhile, we slip in the back while they're distracted."

The more Kaidan thought about it, the more he liked it, even as he was appalled by the ruthlessness of using the colonists like that. "I just..." Shepard tilted her head at him in silent inquiry. "I just don't like using civilians to fight our battles for us."

"They aren't civilians anymore." The very lack of inflection in her answer told him that she was aware of the consequences - and her decision to sacrifice fellow colonists pained her. _More like haunted her._

He slung his arm around her shoulders; she wrapped hers around his waist and leaned against him. "Whether they are or aren't, we'll save as many of them as we can."

"I know." She looked out across the dark, too-still land, but Kaidan got the feeling she wasn't really seeing it. "This was a beautiful colony, once. They deserve better."

"They're survivors, and they're fighting back. It won't be easy, but they'll get through this," he assured her. "They came back after Saren and the geth attacked. They'll come back again."

Shepard seemed unconvinced. "They rebuilt Mindoir. It wasn't the same."

"I didn't say it'd be easy, Shepard. But they'll be back." Glancing at her pensive expression, he guessed, "Bad memories?"

"Yeah. No. Sort of." She made a self-deprecating sound at her own vacillating answer, but then she sobered. "It's just... seeing all these empty buildings when they should've been bustling with energy and people and purpose. Especially in this season." She nodded at the dark outlines of machines standing idle out in the open. "It's getting close to harvesting time, and if no one brings this in... it'll rot in the fields."

Kaidan couldn't really tell, but he supposed she'd know. "You miss it."

"Yes," she breathed, a world of regret and nostalgia in that one simple word. "Traveling on a ship, it's easy to forget the smell of good earth, the soil shifting under your feet, watching crops grow, the feel of the wind against your face, the taste of a cold beer after working for hours in the sun."

He stared at her. There were times when he could predict just what she'd say or do, when he felt he knew her better than anyone else, even Anderson, but then there were times like this, when he never would've suspected just how much she missed her old life.

"So... you never meant to leave Mindoir?" He wasn't sure what to think about that.

"No. I would've been happy to stay, find someone to love, marry, have children." There was a wistfulness in her voice he'd never heard before.

Was it just a longing for a simpler, more peaceful life, or was it more than that? _Maybe... maybe she doesn't want to put up with a moody biotic who thinks too much...?_

He shook off his doubts, because here she was anyway, pressed up against his side, a solid line of heat from thigh to shoulder.

"Then... if the batarians had never - I never would've met you." Kaidan tried to imagine his life without Shepard in it, and failed. The one thing he knew for certain was that it would've been a lot less interesting.

She shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. It's possible I might've been sent to Brain Camp after someone figured out I had biotics. My brother couldn't have covered for me forever, especially once he'd gone to Earth to study."

"Huh. Guess you're right." Would his life have turned out any differently if he'd met Shepard earlier? But they'd been two different people back then, so maybe it was better this way. For all the pain and heartbreak he'd experienced, he wouldn't change any of it if it meant he still arrived at this moment.

"God does appreciate His little ironies," Shepard murmured, as if she'd heard his thoughts. Taking the cinnamon stick out of her mouth, her lips curved in an enigmatic smile, the same one that had set his heart racing three years ago.

Kaidan snorted as he buried his nose into her hair and breathed in the scents of medi-gel, soap, and clean woman. "Yeah, I know - sometimes it seems like the universe is making one big joke at my expense. If I hadn't killed Vyrnnus..."

She turned so that her forehead was resting against his, and her cinnamon-scented words puffed warm against his face as she spoke. "I've always felt a little disturbed when I realize my biotic training was based in no small part on your pain, but... I've lost count of the number of times it's saved my life - and the lives of other people."

"Then I'm glad - I'm happy something good came out of the whole sordid mess," he said, smiling into her skin. "That it helped someone, even if it didn't help me."

Pressing a gentle kiss to his cheek, she reached for his free hand and grasped it. "It doesn't matter how we found each other, Kaidan, as long as we did."

"Yeah," he agreed, holding on tight.


	5. Chapter 5

Neither of them spoke for a while, content to just hold each other. They didn't often get a chance to just sit still like this; there was always someone or something that needed Shepard's attention on the ship, even in the privacy of her cabin, and it was even worse on the Citadel, where random strangers just came up and accosted them. It was good to finally get away from it all, even if it was only a brief respite. He really treasured these rare, quiet moments, free of responsibilities, when they could just be together. Maybe now would be a good time to talk about some things he'd been thinking about.

"You ever thought about what you'll do after the war?" Kaidan asked, straightening up from his comfortable slouch in order to see her face.

Shepard's lips quirked as she let go of his hand to stick the cinnamon stick back into her mouth. "Get blind, stinking drunk."

He bumped her shoulder. "C'mon, I'm serious."

"So am I." She sighed at his reproachful look, and didn't speak for a while; just when he thought she wasn't going to answer, she said, "I don't know. I haven't really thought that far ahead."

Did she mean she'd been too busy... or she didn't expect to survive? The thought brought a chill to his spine.

"One day at a time, one mission at a time. That's about all I can handle right now," she continued, oblivious to his anxiety. Quirking an eyebrow at him, she said, "I know you, Kaidan - you think too much. Say what's on your mind."

He chuckled at the fond exasperation he heard in her tone, then he sobered. "Well, I was thinking, you know... there's gonna be a lot of kids born with biotics in the next few years." And also a lot of kids with terminal brain cancer, but he couldn't even begin to help them.

Shepard straightened, her eyes wide with shock. "God, you're right! It never even occurred to me. But... wait, their biotics won't manifest for a few years yet."

"But, but if an older kid is exposed a second or third time, they might develop biotics, too, and there's a whole lot of loose eezo flying around these days. That's what happened to you, right? You started showing the signs when you were a teenager."

Shepard nodded as she relaxed back into his embrace. "Yeah, that's true."

"Going through puberty's hard enough, but suddenly finding out you're a biotic? That's one hell of a bombshell to get dropped on you, right?" At her encouraging nod, he blurted, "Well, I, I wanna help them."

Cocking her head at him, she observed, "Sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this."

"I guess I have," Kaidan admitted.

"Because of your students in Biotics Division?"

"Yeah," he said, struggling to articulate his feelings. "I didn't think I'd like teaching, but I do, and I didn't expect to find it so... so fulfilling. I'm glad Anderson talked me into it."

"They couldn't have found a better teacher," she said in all seriousness. "I'm proud of you."

He smiled at her. "Thanks."

"Sounds like you've discovered your true calling."

Kaidan opened his mouth, then closed it. "I... I guess I have. Huh. Always thought being a soldier was my calling."

Shepard made a rude noise. "And who says you're only entitled to just one calling in your life, as if there were some kind of limit-one-per-person sale? You're a great soldier, and you should take pride in that, but... you don't really enjoy it, do you?"

"That, that's not true," he protested. "I enjoy working with you and Anderson and James - even EDI! And I like the discipline, seeing new places, meeting new people - it gives me purpose -"

"But you don't like the killing," she said in her most gentle tones. "You wouldn't be who you are if you did. But that's what soldiers have to do, to protect people."

"Yeah, you're right, I don't like it. I held back for a long time, and it wasn't until I saw what Saren did to the colony that I stopped pulling my punches," Kaidan said, looking away. "But -"

Shepard grasped his chin and turned his head so that he had no choice but to look her in the eye. "But there's no shame in wanting to serve in a different way."

"'Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach'," he quoted with a rueful laugh.

She bumped his shoulder. "That doesn't apply to you, and you know it."

Knowing that any further protests would only garner dry yet devastating ripostes, he subsided under her amused gaze. "Anyway, I was thinking you might like teaching, too."

"Me?" she said, drawing back in surprise.

"Yeah. You've got more patience than I do, and that's really the only thing you need when you teach kids."

Shepard looked dubious. "I dunno, Kaidan... do you think I'd be any good at it? I mean, I've never done it before."

"You've never been a diplomat who brokered peace treaties before, either, but not only have you got the krogan cooperating with the turians, but also the geth and the quarians," Kaidan countered. "I think you'd be great at it, and the kids would love having another combat veteran to show 'em the ropes."

She seemed to think it over. "Hmm. But Grissom Academy is gone."

"I know." He still felt a chill whenever he thought about how Cerberus had nearly succeeded in capturing Jack and the students; God only knew what terrible and twisted things would've happened to them. "But there's always going to be a place where human biotics need to train, in one form or another."

"Maybe they'll finally trust biotics enough to let us train on a planet instead of isolating us on a space station." If there was any bitterness in the statement, it was too subtle for him to detect.

"We could settle down nearby." He glanced around the shadowed landscape; it was too dark to make out any details, but the night breeze carried the sharp scent of grass, the earthy smell of soil, and the more complex aroma of all different kinds of crops. The canned, recycled air of ships and space stations just couldn't compare. "Maybe... maybe in a place like this?"

"You mean on a farm? City boy," Shepard teased.

"Hey, I spent my summers at that orchard I told you about," Kaidan protested. "I'm not completely helpless if I step off a street, like James."

She smirked. "Uh-huh."

Clearing his throat, he observed, "It's peaceful here. Quiet. Beautiful, too. You know, I'd love to show you that orchard, some day. I wish I'd had time to show you when we went to Earth." If it was still there. If his mom was still there. He shook off the thought and continued, "It's a lot like this place, only there're a lot more trees, of course."

"Mostly fruit trees, I'm guessing?"

"Yeah. Cherries, apricots and peaches in the summer, pears and apples - all different kinds - the rest of the year. I helped pick the fruit, and I ate until I was nearly sick." He chuckled, remembering how he'd divided the harvest: one for him, one for the basket. Sometimes he'd cheated. "And then I ate some more."

Shepard's laugh blew warm against his neck. "It sounds wonderful. We spent the summers at my aunt's fish farm on the northern edge of Mindoir's temperate zone."

"Why there?"

"Fish grow fat in the winter, and the fatter they are, the better they taste. So if they live in cold water all the time..." Her voice trailed off, leaving an expectant silence.

"They'll get fat and stay fat. Like... like hothouse gardening, only for fish," he answered, and was rewarded with the gleam of her approving smile.

"Even though it was cold, it was hard, smelly work, hauling nets and packing all kinds of seafood for shipment, but at the end of the day my aunt would hand out cold home-brewed beer and ice cream."

"Was she...?" Kaidan stopped, unsure how to broach the subject without bringing up bad memories.

She seemed to understand the unspoken question, anyway. "She passed away a few months before the invasion - old age." With a small smile, she added, "She did hand down the secret recipes for her beer and ice cream to me - said I was the only one who could do them justice. I'll make some for you some day, when I have the time and materials."

"You're going to turn me into the galaxy's first fat biotic, aren't you?" The prospect was not unpleasant. Far from it.

Her grin shone like a beacon in the light of the stars. "Don't worry - I'll give you enough exercise to work it off." It sounded like a threat, but it was more in the way of a promise, he thought.

"I look forward to it. But I'm sorry. I mean, about your aunt," he said, tightening his arm around her.

With a shrug, she said, "I'm just glad she never lived to see what happened, and I don't just mean the attack. When she died, her partner was devastated; she sold the business to some distant cousin after she went back to Earth. He modernized and expanded the place, put in a lot of automation, so he didn't need our help. He's still around, I think - he was offworld when the batarians hit."

Shepard lapsed into a contemplative silence, seeming lost in her memories. All he could do was hug her, letting her know without words that he was there for her.

"You never answered my question," Kaidan said, speaking softly to ease Shepard out of her introspection.

Her thoughtful hum vibrated into his skin and seemed to resonate in his bones. "I'd like a planet. Definitely a planet. Not a space station or a ship, too sterile and cold. A place with wide open spaces and an endless horizon, full of growing things - and things that can grow."

"Sounds great," Kaidan said, wondering if she'd ever felt claustrophobic on the _Normandy_, despite the larger dimensions of the SR-2.

"And a home big enough for a proper kitchen," she added with an ambitious glint in her eye. Then she raised her brows at him. "But, wait, I'd have thought you'd have your heart set on something like the Citadel."

"When I was a kid, it would've been the greatest thing ever to live on a space station. Now... I dunno if I can explain it, but it's too... constrained?" His free hand groped the air, as if he could pluck the right words from nothingness.

"Really? It's the biggest space station in existence."

"But big as it is, it's still confining." Kaidan shrugged. "I dunno, maybe I've spent too much time on ships and stations. There're so many safety regulations and rules you have to follow - all for our own good, I know, but they drive me crazy sometimes. And the fact that it's a trap left by the Reapers doesn't help, either."

"I know what you mean," Shepard said with a slow nod. "Everyone thinks they're safe on the Citadel, that the war can't touch them there, but the Council fleets can't hold off the Reapers if they pour through the relay in force. The best they could do is fight a delaying action while they tried to evacuate the station - except where would they evacuate all those millions of people to? And how?"

"Yeah, there're no planets in the Widow system, though I suppose they could try to get to Bekenstein. The Reapers would block access to the mass relay for sure," he said, contemplating that nightmare scenario. "The Citadel's got, what, eleven million people?"

"Must be higher now with all the refugees. Might be as much as twelve or thirteen million by now," she said in the same glum tones. "It's not the utopia you read about in those adventure stories, is it?"

Perceptive as always. "Yeah," Kaidan agreed. "That was... disappointing."

She shook her head at him. "They're trying, but it's always going to be imperfect."

"Because it's an imperfect world? Galaxy?" he said, gazing up at the stars. From where he was, sitting next to the woman he loved, it all looked pretty damned perfect to him.

"Yeah. Humans, asari, turians, all the others - we're never going to be perfect," Shepard said with a wry chuckle. "The important thing is that we try, and do our best - to the limits of our abilities."

"Like those scientists Vigil told us about, the ones who went through the Conduit to sabotage the Citadel," he said, still awed by what a huge gamble those long-dead Protheans had taken. "They knew their race was doomed, they knew it was a one-way trip, and they didn't know what was on the other side, but they did it anyway to preserve the next cycle, to give a fighting chance to people they never even knew - and never would."

"We won't waste the chance their sacrifice gave us. We can't."

Kaidan decided a change of subject was in order before the conversation turned downright maudlin. "So... any planet in particular?" He hesitated, then ventured, "Mindoir?"

"There's nothing there for me anymore. I've... outgrown it. I've seen too much, experienced too much, met too many people out in the great wide galaxy for me to be content there, though I'd like to visit, every now and then." It was her turn to pause before she went on, her eyes intent on him. "I was thinking... Earth."

He stared at her with complete astonishment. "Really?"

"Why so surprised?" she asked, her smile going lopsided.

"Well, you only saw Vancouver for a few hours when I took you there, not even that much of it, and I thought your incarceration probably didn't leave you with a good impression." _And the Reapers have trashed the entire place by now._ It was a depressing thought.

Shepard reached up and caressed his face with callused fingers. "Because you'll be there, and you're my home."

Touched beyond words, Kaidan pressed her hand against his cheek and kissed her palm. Trust the commander to know what he wanted before he even knew he wanted it. "How d'you figure that?"

"Hm? What?" she said, taking the cinnamon stick out of her mouth.

"That I'll stay on Earth."

"Because you'll want to help with the rebuilding." There was an unspoken _of course_, there. "And you'll want to find the rest of your family," she added, with an air of one who had been there, picked through the ruins - and found it familiar.

"You... didn't go back to Mindoir."

"I was just a scared, angry kid," she said, in cool, dispassionate judgement of her younger self. "I was hardly in any shape to rebuild myself, much less Mindoir. Besides, the batarians weren't interested in destroying the infrastructure; any damage was incidental, not deliberate. A simple snatch-and-grab operation."

It sounded too succinct to be anything but a well-rehearsed statement, no doubt distilled from endless, sleepless nights of agonizing retreads through what-ifs, memory, motives, questions, recriminations and self-recriminations. Kaidan had worn a similar rut into his mind, even if the scale had been small, limited to two people, not one planet.

A rut that was slowly eroding, each time he saw Shepard, felt her breath against his skin, heard her giving orders, sensed the currents of her biotics meshing with his own, among other, more private intimacies.

Shepard had no such assurances, except the forgetfulness only time could bring.

"Would you... help me rebuild?" Earth, Vancouver, his home, their relationship, he wasn't sure which he was referring to. All of the above, maybe.

"You have to ask?" she said with exasperated affection. "Yes. I will."

It wasn't going to be that simple, of course. First, they had to defeat the Reapers, and survive, somehow - and they _would_, dammit. That silent, fierce cry of defiance came right from the depths of his soul, thrown like a gauntlet into the face of the uncaring universe. Then he ducked his head, lips seeking hers, and tasted spicy cinnamon as her warm mouth parted under his, a stark contrast to the cool breeze that rustled through the crops. That, too, was a taunt hurled into the void, except it was mostly for himself.

When they had to come up for air, they were both breathing hard; she leaned her forehead against his, her exhalations feathering his cheeks, making the chill night seem cold.

"I love you," Shepard whispered, then he felt her lips move as she smiled into his skin. "But you knew that already."

"Doesn't mean I'll get tired of hearing it." Kaidan kissed her again, quick and light. It wasn't enough, but he had to ration them - the next couple of days would be busy ones. "I love you, too."

"I really enjoy talking with you, but it's late... I guess we should go back in, get some sleep," she sighed as she tucked the cinnamon stick into a pocket, but she didn't suit action to words.

He supposed it was up to him to summon up the will to get them moving. With great reluctance, he let go of her and slid off the top of the prefab, landing with a soft grunt. The commander followed, but he caught her around the waist and held her against him, indulging himself in her scent and warmth - and her firm, muscular body, which was quite obvious through the thin mesh. When they had to part in order to walk inside, the air felt colder than it really was after their embrace. When her hand slipped into his, he smiled at the simple gesture.

Liara had taken herself off to the storeroom where he'd placed the medical supplies, to judge by the thin line of light showing under the door. James and Tali had complained, or maybe she'd needed privacy and quiet to do her research. Kaidan hoped she had the sense to get some rest instead of working all night; he'd tell her to go to bed, but it'd be easier to pry the teeth out of a brute than part an academic from her data.

Kaidan tried not to let his imagination run too rampant as he pulled off his boots and stripped out of his suit, knowing Shepard was doing the same thing right next to him. Trying to console himself with the fact that the bed was really too narrow for two people, he slid under the covers, closed his eyes, and resigned himself to spending the night virtuously alone.

His eyes flew open when he felt a presence next to his bed and saw the shadow of someone bending over him, but a hand covered his mouth before he could speak. Combat reflexes took over, his hands already grabbing hold of his unknown assailant before his brain could intervene, then a warm breath of cinnamon drifted to his nose and betrayed the identity of his would-be captor. A corner of the blanket was lifted up, letting in the cool night air, and then the scent and slide of skin on warm bare skin revealed more.

"Shepard, what're you -!" he hissed. A callused finger pressed against his mouth, stilling his protest. Then it was replaced by warm lips and a hot tongue, effectively silencing him, and he - weak man that he was - allowed it.

He converted his grip on Shepard from the regulation judo hold on the fly to a much more gentle embrace. As his hands traced the arches of her shoulderblades and the curve of her back, he found that she was, as he'd suspected, completely naked. Gloriously and delightfully naked, oh yeah. Fingers encountering the upward swell of her ass, he took possessive double handfuls of the firm flesh and pulled her toward him. God, he was hard already, and they hadn't even done anything but kiss and hold each other yet. Her self-satisfied purr told him she approved of his silent invitation to stay in the too-small bed with him.

Kaidan froze when he heard James snuffle in his sleep, only relaxing again when the other man grunted and rolled over. What had he been thinking?! There was only one empty bunk separating him from Tali and James, and Liara could return at any moment. The room was dim, to allow people to sleep, but it wasn't so dark that people wouldn't notice that there were two bodies writhing under the covers. Heat of a different kind suffused his face.

On the other hand, it was also kind of hot. _Jesus, never figured myself for a closet exhibitionist._ Whatever inhibitions he had about sex in semi-public places, his body didn't share them. When she threw her leg over his hip - Shepard certainly had no inhibitions - he had to bury his face in the crook of her neck to muffle his moan.

With a supreme effort of will, he pushed her leg back down and placed his hands on her shoulders, which were somewhat less fraught than other parts of her anatomy. It took another moment to regain the power of speech. "Shepard, we can't - the others, _they're right here!_" he hissed into her ear.

"So?" she murmured against his lips as she pressed herself close. "You're not shy, are you?"

Kaidan whimpered; he would've made a tactical retreat, except he was already teetering on the edge of the small bed, and he'd rather not lose the concealment of the covers. Not to mention the noise would surely wake everyone up if he crashed to the floor. In trying to push her away, his hands somehow ended up on her chest, and he couldn't bring himself to let go. Dammit, none of this was helping, gibbered the part of him still concerned with propriety. It was being rapidly drowned out by his lust.

He groped after his scattered thoughts, catching one before her searing kisses blew it right out again. "T-they'll hear us - we'll wake them up -" he mumbled against her demanding mouth.

"No, we won't, not if we're very, very quiet. So none of your usual antics," she breathed into his ear; as quiet as her whisper had been, he could still hear the laughter in every word.

His need warred with his embarrassment, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion, what with Shepard's warm, naked body pressed against his, her needy little growly noises vibrating in his ear, and the certain evidence of just how much she wanted him. With his - admittedly very threadbare - resistance melted down by all that, he gathered her close and returned her kisses with equal fervor. She smiled against his lips, and drew her leg over his hip again, completing her capture.

It didn't occur to him until he had his hands back on her chest again that he could've simply scrambled out of bed on his side if his protest had been all that heartfelt. By then it was too late; he'd already slid down that slippery slope of surrender and lost all traction on his self-control. There was no backing out now - he was committed. In more ways than one.

"Antics, huh?" Kaidan growled. "I'll show you _antics._"


	6. Chapter 6

Kaidan's omni-tool roused him, sending an annoying, bone-tingling buzz along his arm where it was implanted. With a wordless grumble, he slapped at it to turn it off, and opened his eyes. Through the windows at the other end of the long, low room, the sky was still full of stars, but there was a faint hint of blue that suggested dawn wasn't that far off. It was a positively unholy hour to be awake, but he sat up anyway and scrubbed at his face with both hands. He was unsurprised to find he was alone in bed; Shepard had always been an early riser.

Last night might have been a dream - except for the lingering scents of sex, sweat, and her musk on the sheets, the pleasant ache in his muscles, the taste of cinnamon and her essence on his lips, and the slight sting where her fingernails had marked him. One day, he promised himself, they'd wake up together and damned well stay in bed until it was gone past noon.

He glanced around the room, and was able to make out more details as the sky to the east began to lighten. Tali and James were still asleep, but the bunk to Kaidan's left, which had been empty when he and Shepard had come in, was now occupied. He smiled, because even in sleep Liara hadn't been able to let go of her precious Prothean data; a data pad was still clutched in her slack hand, and more were scattered on the floor next to her bed.

With everyone still in bed, Kaidan took the opportunity to use the shower, taking his armor with him so that he could do his best to clean it with the limited facilities, and refill the food reservoirs. He did pause in the middle of shaving, his attention drawn to the livid bitemark on his shoulder; with a smirk at his reflection, he finished clearing away the stubble that darkened his cheeks and pulled on his undersuit.

EDI had already drawn up a watch rotation, which had been sent along with the alarm, but he took a moment to change the sheets and make the bed neat enough to please even the most rabid drill sergeant. Shepard hadn't said anything, but he was sure she'd want them to leave these people's homes in the same condition they'd found them.

For a moment he wondered if people had sought refuge in his parents' house in Vancouver, and the orchard; had they looted the place? Trampled tokens of his childhood memories underfoot, heedless of their sentimental value? He shook off his unease as he put on the rest of his armor; he was light-years away from Earth, and couldn't do a damned thing about any of it.

On his way out the door, Kaidan paused by Liara's bed to pull up the covers where they'd slipped down her shoulders and take the data pad from her hand to stack it with the others.

Outside, he took a deep breath of the clean, grass-scented air - so different from the stale atmosphere on a ship or space station - and pulled on his helmet, then set off on his assigned patrol, onward and upward on a carefully paved path that wound around the hill. Telemetry readings scrolled past on his HUD, courtesy of the lines of drones drifting along the outer perimeter a klick out, showing nothing amiss as their sensors swept for details his naked eye would miss. They were on an elevated position, which gave him a damn fine view of the surrounding area, a fact that had pleased Garrus and his need for clear lines of fire.

Eden Prime was as pretty as it looked in the vids - he'd never have believed a Reaper had been through it if he hadn't lived through the experience: it was all gentle, rolling hills here, covered with crops that swayed in the wind. Some people might find the vista of endless fields boring, but he didn't. Through his helmet's olfactory filters, he could smell the rich scent of growing things and soil and fresh, unpolluted air. If he ignored the columns of smoke in the distance, he could almost pretend Cerberus had never attacked the colony.

Some sort of farming machines were scattered around, squatting at the ends of cleared paths where they had been abandoned, their operators nowhere to be found. There were no signs of violence that he could see when he dialed up the magnification on his helmet, so the unknown colonists must've left on their own two feet. Why? Fleeing from Cerberus? Surely they would've recognized two Alliance shuttles and known they were friendly.

Or they'd gotten news of Benning and heard that Cerberus had been murdering the civilians right in the streets, and they'd decided that discretion was the better part of valor, Kaidan thought grimly as he turned the corner of a prefab.

A flash drew his attention, and he looked up to see Garrus had already set up a cozy sniper's nest in the topmost prefab, the tallest point in this tiny settlement; the light had been the rising sun striking against the long barrel of the black sniper rifle propped on a windowsill. Garrus, hidden in the shadows, leaned out to raise one hand in greeting, and Kaidan lifted his arm in acknowledgement.

"It's too quiet, as the saying goes," Garrus said over the comm after they'd exchanged greetings. "No animals, no vehicles... no people."

"Yeah," Kaidan agreed, glad he wasn't the only one bothered by it. "Wait a minute - what do you know about farming? I thought turians ate mostly meat."

His friend snorted. "And where did you think we get our brandy, Kaidan? Out of the turian equivalent of cows?"

"Oh. Right."

"Well... that's about all I know," Garrus admitted, and they shared a quiet chuckle.

They both fell silent for a few minutes as they gazed at the farmlands.

Kaidan tried to look on the bright side. "On the other hand, it might look bad now, but there's really not that much damage, either."

"That's something, I suppose," the turian replied, and Kaidan had no doubt he was thinking about the destruction the Reapers were wreaking on his homeworld right now. "It's pretty here. Peaceful." There was something in Garrus's voice that suggested he was no longer familiar with the concept.

"Let's help keep it that way."

Garrus straightened and nodded down at him, then went back to scanning the area. "Damn right."

"Need anything while I'm down here?"

"Thanks for the offer, but no. I've got plenty of clips, dextro rations, water, and a great view. I'm all set."

Kaidan resumed his patrol, and paused on the path when he spotted EDI's platform at one of the generators, where they'd been sheltered under a natural overhang of rock. "What's our status?" he asked as he kept an eye on their surroundings.

With a quiet whir of motors, EDI straightened up and closed the panel. He fought the urge to step back; a part of his mind still classified the AI's body as a threat, even after all this time. "I have completed repairs to the power generators, Major. They seem to have been sabotaged by the colonists, rather than by Cerberus, as the extent of the damage was minimal and easily fixed. It may have been an attempt to dissuade enemy troops from turning these prefabs into a base."

"Which kinda leads to the question of where the hell they are now."

"The colonists have lived here for years," EDI answered. "It would follow that they have knowledge of where best to go to ground, and a high chance they have fortified their positions and have them well stocked with food and munitions. After Saren's attack on the colony, they would have taken such precautions."

"For their sakes, I hope they're tucked up nice and tight somewhere safe," Kaidan said. "We know there's some kind of organized resistance here that's fighting back, but it's hard to help someone if we can't find them or communicate with them."

"Our primary mission is to recover the Prothean artifact - the Prothean - Cerberus has found," EDI said. "Dr. T'Soni is in a better position than we are to help the colonists, through her Shadow Broker contacts."

"I know what our mission is, thanks," he said, his voice dry. "I want to do something more, if we can. Shepard would, too." _Shepard especially._

"We would have little time with which to do so," the AI said, not knowing he'd said much the same to Shepard the previous day. She began placing tools back into a battered case that no doubt had belonged to one of the colonists. "We must return to the _Normandy_ immediately once our mission is complete."

Kaidan scanned the empty countryside, then the equally empty prefabs, and sighed. "I don't think Hackett would begrudge us a day or two, but you're right. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Have you seen Shepard anywhere?" He could check his HUD, but it was easier to ask, since they weren't in a combat situation.

"The commander is in prefab five," EDI said after an infinitesimal pause as she consulted with the drones. "There seems to be an inordinate amount of activity inside, the nature of which I have not yet ascertained."

"Prefab five? The one set aside as the kitchen?"

"Yes."

Wondering if Shepard was making bread as she'd promised, Kaidan ignored his salivating mouth and the sudden rumbling of his empty stomach and said, "Well, I'll go check on prefab five, since it's on the way. Find out what you can about what happened to the colonists from the recordings, maybe something useful will come up."

"Yes, Major."

"EDI," he said, and stopped, unsure why he felt uneasy broaching the subject. Maybe it was because he was talking about the commander behind her back, but he'd never get another chance to ask her. The AI, with her strange metallic eyes, was giving him an expectant look.

"Major?" she prompted with surprising gentleness.

"You mentioned yesterday that there were many missions where I fought against Cerberus, but... how did you know? I mean, Shepard didn't take you along very often." He hesitated. "Or do you just read her reports?" EDI had access to, well, _everything_ - and somehow no one minded, not even him.

"I was referring to the missions three years ago, when you served on the _Normandy_ SR-1." EDI paused, and went on when he nodded. "Cerberus went to great lengths, sparing no expense, to collect as much data on Shepard as they could find: news reports, mission reports, recordings, personnel files. There was mention of you in all of them." She sounded almost apologetic.

"Oh. Okay." Kaidan was disturbed by the fact that Cerberus was able to access restricted files, but not very surprised; he'd long suspected the former black ops group had maintained ties to the Alliance military.

After a few minutes in which he thought over EDI's words, he said, "I can see why Cerberus would need that sort of information when they were, were rebuilding her, but Shepard told me she was watched day and night -"

"Having spent billions of credits on the commander's reconstruction, the Illusive Man wanted to keep an eye on his 'investment'." The AI might've been talking about the weather, and not the woman he loved. "Operative Lawson was especially concerned as to whether Shepard retained her memories and personality, and only close observation could determine the success - or failure - of the Lazarus Project."

Despite his armor and the sunlight, he felt cold. "So it's true - you really did spy on Shepard." _She was a woman under siege_, Thane's deep, hoarse voice said in memory.

"I monitored all crew members, not just those of the ground team," EDI corrected. "The Illusive Man did order me to place special emphasis on Shepard. I was to report any anomalies to him and to Operative Lawson."

"'Anomalies'?" Kaidan repeated, frowning.

"Any changes in her behavior that were not extrapolated or consistent based on logs of her activities prior to the Collector attack on the SR-1. I ceased reporting when Shepard informed the crew that she had cut ties with Cerberus, and we were now rogue -"

"Shepard never went rogue," Kaidan corrected her, his voice coming out harsher than he intended. "She's always had her own agenda."

"Of course." The AI took no umbrage at his sharp tone; she didn't take umbrage at anything.

After a few minutes passed in silence, Kaidan ventured, "And were there any... anomalies?"

EDI answered readily enough. "My data is incomplete, as Shepard would leave the _Normandy_ for long stretches of time, and most if not all of the crew would do the same -"

He made an impatient gesture. "Your best guess is fine." If he didn't know better, he'd think EDI was stalling.

If the AI had to pause to gather her thoughts, it was too brief to be discernible. "Shepard spoke with all her crew members, encouraging them to talk about their lives, but volunteered little to no information about herself."

Knowing that Cerberus was watching her every move and listening to every word she said, not to mention analyzing them, Kaidan wasn't surprised that the commander would react by clamming up. "Was that all?"

"That is all I know by direct observation. The rest is speculation, since she was holding meetings with the team elsewhere, away from Cerberus surveillance, because they would prepare gear and go out on a mission immediately after they returned. It is telling that Operatives Taylor and Lawson were excluded as well, and they were not included until much later."

That did seem like the kind of thing Shepard would do to tweak the Illusive Man's nose. She'd work with Cerberus, but she'd do things her way. He eyed the AI in speculation, because there was a lot she'd left out. There was also no point in pressing further, because she'd just take refuge in the literal truth.

"I wonder where she went?" he asked instead.

"After Jeff removed my shackles, he told me Shepard would hold meetings at clubs or bars, selecting a different one each time," EDI said. "He accompanied her on several occasions."

"He probably just went along for the free drinks." Kaidan snorted, though he doubted Shepard permitted anything stronger than coffee at those conferences.

"A plausible hypothesis - and there is a high probability it is accurate."

Using a club or a bar for conferences was most irregular, but it made sense; the noise would foil any eavesdroppers, and no one would comment on the large size of the group. He'd bet his family's wine farm that Garrus, and later Tali, had handled the security arrangements. Still, the _Normandy_ was supposed to be their base of operations, a safe place for the crew to regroup and relax, and he frowned to think that Shepard hadn't been able to let her guard down while aboard the ship. Maybe it was a good thing the SR-2 was so much more different from the smaller SR-1.

He thought of the people he'd met briefly, Shepard's previous team: Jack - he knew her already, from his work with his students - Thane, Samara, Jacob, Legion. Except for Jacob, Garrus, and the mercenary he'd seen on Horizon, none of them were soldiers. Strong and disparate personalities, each in their own way; he could easily imagine the difficulties the commander must've had, trying to forge them into a cohesive fighting unit - and all while bearing up under Cerberus's watchful eye.

"It... must've taken her some time to get the crew up to speed," Kaidan said. "I've read the dossiers on Shepard's crew, and except for Garrus, Tali, and the two Cerberus operatives, none of them were what I'd call team players."

"You forgot Legion," EDI objected.

He shouldn't be surprised the AI would defend a fellow synthetic.

"I didn't. He - it -" he fumbled with pronouns, none of which could be readily applied to a networked AI "- they're a team player by default, I guess, but only with other geth."

"That is true," EDI conceded. "You are correct: combat and operational effectiveness did not approach prior levels until approximately two months before Commander Shepard ordered the _Normandy_ through the Omega-4 relay."

"Just two months before!" His brows flew up in surprise, because that meant the commander had had only four short months to whip her crew into shape - four months of intense training and fighting, day in and day out. "Shepard - they must've worked hard."

The AI confirmed his guess. "When the commander was not in conference with one or another of the crew, discussing tactics or strategy, details of the previous mission, she would personally conduct combat training in the hangar bay."

Kaidan blew out his breath, thinking about all the time Shepard must've spent to get her crew ready for the fight with the Collectors. Part of it, a big part, would've been to prepare her team for a suicide mission, but he suspected she'd also thrown herself into the work to keep her mind off certain things, too. Like finding two years had passed her by, her old crew had gone their separate ways, and - he winced in memory - some of them had had mixed feelings about her return.

But he had no more doubts now - he was with her, like Liara and Chief Adams. Until the end, whatever that end might be. Even though he still felt a sharp pang of guilt when he thought about how he'd treated her, how he'd left her to fight without his support, he'd done his best to make up for it. That was all he could do, because he couldn't change the past, any more than Shepard could.

He gave himself a mental shake, and was reminded that he still had a patrol to finish, and if he knew Shepard - and he thought he did - there was a damn fine breakfast waiting for him. "Well, thanks, EDI. You've given me a lot to think about." As usual.

At her nod, he left her to it, and continued down to the bottom of the hill, where the colonists had prefabs set aside for rest and recreation; he supposed no one wanted to hike up to the top after a long day working out in the fields. It marked the end of his patrol, and he could, with a clear conscience, head into the communal kitchen at last. Liara, still sounding groggy from being woken up, acknowledged that it was her turn to stand sentry, though he wondered if the archaeologist could drag her attention away from her data to do so.

As EDI had said, there seemed to be a lot of activity in prefab five. Kaidan ducked his head in the door and grinned at the sight of Cortez sitting at a table, hands busy wrapping a sandwich. Shepard had taken off her helmet and gauntlets, but not the rest of her armor, which made for a strange sight as she bent over a sizzling pan, ever-present cinnamon stick in her mouth. Her eyes lit when she spotted him, and beckoned him inside.

There was just a hint of promise in her eyes and in the curve of her lips - they seemed a little swollen - and he wondered suddenly if she'd seen the lovebites _he_ had left on _her_ when she'd put on her armor. Heat that had nothing to do with the fully loaded stove warmed him from his head right down to his toes, and he was suddenly grateful his helmet hid his flushing face.

"Great timing, Kaidan - come see if I've overcooked this." The commander raised a spatula of something that looked like sliced beef, hot and savory, dripping with juices. Even through his helmet's filters it smelled delicious.

Always eager to sample Shepard's excellent cooking, Kaidan unsealed his helmet, and took a deep breath of air that was redolent with the scents of fresh hot bread and roasting meat.

He bent and took a bite of the offering, half closed his eyes as he chewed, then pronounced his verdict. "Mm-mn! Delicious as always. It's perfect, not overcooked at all."

"Told you it was fine, ma'am," Cortez said from the table, an amused smile flashing in his dark face.

"So it is," she said, accepting the reproof without rancor.

"Didn't think you had KP duty, Cortez," Kaidan teased as he judged it safe enough to leave his helmet off and hooked the straps to his belt. "What with being our shuttle pilot and our procurement specialist, I would think you'd have enough on your plate. So to speak."

The pilot's smile was beatific as he replied, "It has its rewards. I get to be the first one to taste test everything Shepard makes."

Kaidan grinned. "Beats the hell outta military rations, doesn't it."

Cortez gave him a vigorous nod. "Amen, sir."

"I did wonder at your enthusiasm, Lieutenant." Shepard's tone was deadpan, but laughter glinted in her gray eyes.

"Always happy to serve, ma'am," Cortez said with a little sitting-down bow.

Kaidan looked around the kitchen, at the opened sacks of vegetables, the empty bags, the pans on the stove, and did a mental tally of the provisions they'd used. "Do you think we ought to, I dunno, pay? Or, or leave a note or... something?"

Amusement fading, Shepard pointed to a generous stack of credits left on a shelf. "I'd normally ask permission first, but there's no one left to give it. All I can do is pay for the food and the use of their facilities, and hope someone's able to come along to collect. Eventually."

She turned back to the stove, but Kaidan hadn't missed the disquiet in her eyes. The complete lack of people in what should've been a busy little community was getting to her, too. Had gotten to her. Perhaps especially her; she might be a hard-ass soldier now, but she'd grown up in a place very like this.

Unsure of what he could say in answer to that, Kaidan reached for her free hand and squeezed it; a heartbeat later she returned the grip. Then he blinked as Shepard raised his hand and plunked a generous half-loaf of bread into his palm, fresh from the oven, and hot enough that he could feel it even through his gloves. His stomach roused and howled with hunger at the delectable scents of roast beef and cheese.

"Is this...?" Kaidan began, staring down at the offering.

Shepard nodded, grinning. "A steak sandwich."

"You... you remembered." Suspecting he had a silly, stupid smile stretching his face, Kaidan stuffed it with the sandwich instead. Choirs of angels and heavenly music did not serenade him as hot beef, rich juices, smooth but surprisingly sharp cheese, and chewy bread flooded his mouth, but he felt there should've been.

Her grin transmuting to a satisfied smug look, the commander took Kaidan by the elbow and steered him to a chair Cortez had kicked out for him at the table. Not taking his hands off his breakfast, and keeping his mouth busy and full, Kaidan sat and watched as Cortez separated his packages into democratic piles. Shepard went back to the stove, then returned with a cup of tea and her own morning meal, a hearty ham and cheese sandwich similar to his own. Done with his task, the shuttle pilot smiled and went to wash the dishes, leaving the two marines to their contented munching.

Kaidan swallowed the last bite and sat back with a replete sigh, feeling full, but not so full that he felt sleepy. Looking down at his sadly empty hands, he wondered if Shepard would say something dry if he licked his fingers, or just give him a smirk. "That was great."

Shepard said nothing, but her lips twitched up in a quiet smile as she pulled her gloves back on, but it faded soon enough. "We'll start our briefing as the others come in."

He nodded, but stood and made a beeline for the coffee maker, and took out a precious packet of ground coffee from a pocket on his belt. If he was to help the commander lead the briefing, he was going to need it.

As though summoned by her words, James clomped in a few minutes later, also in full armor like Kaidan and Shepard, but unlike them, still yawning, rumpled, and sleepy.

James stared at Kaidan's cup of coffee like he wouldn't mind biting his superior officer's hand off to get some. With studied innocence, Kaidan moved aside, revealing the percolating coffee maker. The other man gave him a dirty look, which he returned with a bland smile, but filled his own empty mug in reproachful silence.

That silence grew more meditative and cheerful after Cortez handed James his own breakfast, and the younger marine quickly revived, recovering his good humor. "So what's the plan, Commander?"

After a quick check of her omni-tool, Shepard said, "Let's call in everyone, first, so I only have to explain once."

A moment later, Garrus and Tali came in, not quite holding hands, but walking very close to each other; they were talking in between bites of their dextro rations. At least, Kaidan assumed Tali was chewing, since she was pushing the food through a clever little slot in her helmet. Liara followed soon after, her bleary eyes marked with light purple rings, but that hadn't stopped her from taking her data pads along. EDI slipped in and stood in a corner, still and watchful. The little prefab grew crowded with so many of them in the same space, but with some people standing and others sitting, no one had to have any elbows poking them in awkward places.

Shepard talked about their plan to have James's Team Two cause a distraction at the Cerberus ambush before attacking the dig site, while Shepard's Team One laid low and watched for an opportunity to snatch the Prothean once the enemy forces stationed there were pushed off balance. Then she transmitted the maps EDI had put together of the dig site, along with all the rest of the intelligence they'd gathered last night.

Garrus was the first to speak after a thoughtful silence, one finger rubbing at the scars on his face. "I don't like it, Shepard. We'd be too far away to help if something goes wrong on your end - and we'll only get one chance at this."

The commander's nod acknowledged the point. "The risk isn't as high as you think. My team will be going in on foot, just like we did yesterday. From the looks of those guns they set up, and their patrol patterns, I think they're more concerned about the sky, not the ground."

"I suppose it really isn't that risky, compared to some of the really crazy stuff we've been through," Tali observed.

"Compared to fighting two Reapers on foot and summoning the mother of all thresher maws, it does seem pretty tame," was Liara's sage comment.

"Let's get back on track," Kaidan said, because they could waste the whole morning on comparisons, both humorous and... not. The whole day, even. "Does everyone understand their part in the plan? Any questions?"

James straightened from where he'd been leaning on the counter. "Do we try to help the colonists? I mean, it's gonna be a helluva scramble in the dark, with Cerberus ambushing them and us counterambushing them. People are gonna get hurt."

Kaidan caught the flicker of unease in Shepard's eyes, but she only said, "Distracting Cerberus is still your primary objective. You're just going a bit more out of your way to do it than we first planned, is all. Get in, get out, fast. Don't let yourselves get tangled up, because we're counting on you to be our distraction - and our backup."

The lieutenant subsided with an unhappy frown, but said a reluctant, "Aye aye."

In a quieter voice, the commander said, "I don't like it any better than you do, James." The younger marine looked at her, then nodded.

Liara bit her lip, looking concerned. "If we're going on foot, how are we supposed to transport the Prothean?"

Cortez cleared his throat. "Don't worry, Liara, I'll be flying the getaway shuttle."

The archaeologist looked dubious, as if she were mentally measuring the capacity of the Kodiak, and found it wanting. "I suppose it would be out of the question to try to take along any Prothean artifacts that happen to be lying around?" she asked in a wistful tone.

"We'll see," was Shepard's noncommittal reply, but her lips twitched at this apparent lack of scruples on Liara's part.

They settled some more of the practical details, like which comm frequency to use if they were forced to break radio silence, what to do if this or that emergency came up, who would gather the drones back in, and sharing out programs EDI had written, tailored to target weaknesses in Cerberus systems. Kaidan, looking over the code with a curious eye, noted that they were not the elegant, efficient ECM he'd come to expect from EDI, but brutal, crude - and powerful. Any use would set all sorts of alarms ringing, but he supposed that was the point; Team Two's distraction would hit Cerberus hard at every level, from the tangible to the intangible.

It took hardly any time after that to get ready for their separate journeys, but of course they all traveled light. Team One would be going on foot, just like they had yesterday, while Team Two would take a more leisurely ride in a shuttle, since they had further to go and needed the time to do their own reconnaisance. The mysterious packages Cortez had been wrapping turned out to be food Shepard had put together for their lunch and dinner; Kaidan tucked his with care into a pouch and made sure they were secure.

Kaidan followed Shepard as she made one last inspection of the prefabs, which were echoing and empty, even more so after the brief time the team had filled them with life and light and bustle. Their absence left an almost sad air of - not neglect, but lost possibility, stunted. Forever? His own blithe words, _They'll come back again_, meant to comfort her, turned to ashes in his mouth. It was a wonder Shepard hadn't said something scathing in reply to that pithy statement. Or hit him as he deserved.

He searched her face as she stepped out of the last prefab, but it was unreadable. Unsure of what to say, he put his hand on her shoulder, but whatever she saw in his expression made her own ease.

With a jerk of her chin, she said, "C'mon, Kaidan. Let's kick some Cerberus ass."

"Aye aye!" he replied, bracing to attention at her crisp tone, glad to see determination replace the melancholy on her face.


	7. Chapter 7

Kaidan was not surprised when Shepard decided on taking a different route to the dig site; the commander had taken one glance at the lavender rings the asari still sported around her eyes, pursed her lips in thought, and taken them over easier terrain.

Easier was relative, he thought, as he trudged through yet another empty orchard, feet slipping on overripe fruit that had fallen from the branches, unharvested. The still air beneath the trees stank with it, sweet and sour at the same time. The eerie silence pressed on him with an almost palpable weight, making him feel like an uncomfortable trespasser again. None of them spoke, and they passed like ghosts, flitting from shadow to dappled shadow under a bright sun.

The commander kept them under cover at all times, forcing them to walk further, in a much more roundabout way to the dig site than they had yesterday. They took frequent rest breaks to conserve energy, eating their nutritious if bland high energy bars, but no one suggested taking any food from the cultivated bounty all around them. They did fill their water bottles at one farm, as empty as the rest, where automated sprinklers were still watering the plants. Or rather, Shepard did, moving through the crops and leaving scarcely a ripple to mark her passage.

Shepard, who had taken point, was twenty meters ahead, her black armor blending into the shadow of a one-story prefab, this one set away from another cluster about a mile away, almost but not quite sheltered under a large grove of trees that he suspected had been planted for pleasure, not produce.

Kaidan came alert when he saw her hand signal, and he and Liara came in, collapsing the points of their wedge formation, crawling on hands and knees through tall stalks of uncut grass. He winced, because the rustling and crunching of their passage seemed loud enough to wake the dead.

Once they'd crouched down near her, the commander broke the hours-long silence. "We've made excellent time. The diversion is still hours away, so I was thinking we could take a breather here, since it's the last good cover we'll have before we reach the dig site." She was carefully not looking at Liara.

Kaidan glanced at the asari, who was doing her best not to droop. Liara was in top condition, but she was more used to short, intense fights than long marches in the country, though she had bravely not said a word in complaint at the pace. He also knew she hadn't gotten more than a few hours of sleep.

His legs were tired, and he was honest enough to admit, if only to himself, that he wasn't used to long forced marches in the country any more than Liara was. Like the archaeologist, he was more familiar with maneuvering in space stations and streets and other flat, level surfaces, and traveling to those various combat zones in a shuttle, not on his own two feet. Only Shepard was in her element, here.

"Good idea. I could use the break," he lied, but only a little.

At Shepard's gesture, he crept up to the door and bypassed the simple lock, then took point, his pistol in hand, as he entered the long, low, windowless building. Behind him, he heard the door slide shut, and quiet footsteps as the others followed him inside.

He had to switch to night vision because it was dark and dusty, the musty air laden with the strong smells of metal and industrial chemicals. Liara's lone light played over shelves, storage crates and small pieces of farming equipment as she paced her own section. It took them some minutes to establish a proper perimeter. Cluttered as the place was, there was still plenty of room left over for three people and their minimal gear.

"Do you think it's safe enough to turn on the lights?" Liara asked. "And if we keep the door closed, it will be very stuffy in here."

The commander nodded. "Kaidan, do you think you can fiddle the controls so the draw on the generator won't light up on any sensors? It'd be nice if we could see our hands in front of our faces."

"If it's still running, yeah. We can always leave the door open a crack for fresh air if turning them both on will make the power consumption too obvious."

It only took him a minute to find and hack the simple controls, setting the ventilation and the lights to draw minimal power, then he helped the others in moving and stacking crates for extra floor space.

Kaidan glanced up at Shepard as he rummaged through some boxes for something that could soften the floor; sleeping in their armor was going to be uncomfortable enough. "We should set up a watch."

By unspoken assent, Liara was given the third watch, and she was tired enough not to protest as she settled down onto a makeshift pallet made of empty sacks, using her jacket as a pillow.

Not wanting to disturb the asari, he met up with Shepard at the other end of the prefab, where she was monitoring Cerberus comm chatter. He paused. "Why don't you get some rest, too?" he said, jerking his head towards where Liara had bedded down. "I can keep watch."

"I'm not tired," she said as she switched to a visual of the dig site on her omni-tool, relegating the comm chatter to the background. He heard the smile in her words when she added, "Got just enough exercise to get a good night's rest." Her voice dropped to a smoky purr, and something inside him shivered, then clenched. "A _real_ good night."

"We're on duty," Kaidan sighed, not in admonishment, but with a kind of wistfulness he couldn't keep out of his tone.

The smile in her voice changed into a smirk, and he couldn't help grinning in response when Shepard mused, "Liara's going to have to take her turn on watch at some point."

"Hm," was his noncommittal but thoughtful reply.

He opened the door to release some sentry drones to patrol the perimeter, then sat down on the crate next to her. Simpler, and correspondingly smaller than the combat drones Cortez had deployed around their makeshift base, the tiny devices would be undetectable to scans. This close to their target, they'd be less conspicuous than the recognizable silhouette of a sentry marching back and forth above the tall stalks.

The silence that fell between them this time was companionable, not fraught with tension like it had been on their march, and he relaxed into the routine task of programming the drones' search patterns.

"Anything on the comm?" Kaidan asked as he closed down his omni-tool and stretched.

Shepard shook her head, then tilted her omni-tool display towards him, where there were still images of the dig site, cycling through various angles. "EDI set up a secure channel with the _Normandy_, and she's been sending back aerial surveillance in tight bursts, at random times an hour to reduce the chances of being detected. There's been no real movement, so they're probably still packing up."

"Good - we won't have to scramble."

Which had been his first fear, when they'd started this almost leisurely journey. On foot, they would've had no way to catch a Cerberus shuttle once it was in the air, not even if they called on Cortez to give chase. The _Normandy_ could, but they couldn't risk Cerberus blowing up their own shuttle just to keep the Prothean out of anyone else's hands. He wouldn't put it past them.

"Any word from Team Two?" she asked, not looking up from the display, which was now cycling through various grainy, close-up views of the buildings at the dig site.

He shook his head. "Not a peep - but then I didn't really expect any." If Team Two did break radio silence, it would mean they had run into trouble they couldn't handle - and he was confident they could handle anything short of a Reaper destroyer.

What he was more concerned about now was Shepard's almost obsessive attention to the details. While it was never a bad thing to know enemy territory like the back of your hand, they'd all memorized it by now. Not that they needed to strain their memory - there simply weren't that many prefabs and paths at the dig site, and while the dig itself was more of a mess, Cerberus had conveniently excavated and packed Prothean artifacts for shipment on the makeshift shuttlepad at the bottom of the lift.

After unsealing his helmet and pulling it off, Kaidan had to resist sneezing; the dust they'd disturbed still hung in the air, and without his helmet's protective filters to protect his sinuses, it was making his nose itch. Despite that, it was important that he be able to see her face; their helmets masked too much.

"Wishing you were with Team Two?" he asked.

Only someone who knew her well, and sitting as close to her as he was, would notice that startled twitch as she looked up from her display. With a shrug, she pulled off her own helmet and said, "I'm a marine - what I want doesn't matter. Our primary mission is to retrieve the Prothean - I have to be here."

The glow from her omni-tool played across her features, but the garish illumination and the dimmed prefab lights revealed very little of her expression.

"They'll get it done," he said, in answer to the worry she wouldn't voice.

Shepard shook her head. "But James is right, for once. The colonists are nervous and scared, and you know how dangerous scared civilians can be, especially when they're carrying weapons. Add in a Cerberus ambush and Team Two's counterambush? At night? A helluva lot of things can go wrong in the dark."

"I know," Kaidan agreed. "Shit happens, even on the best-planned op, but we can trust Team Two to do everything in their power to get the civilians out of the line of fire."

The commander shut off her omni-tool, and eyed him. "You think I'm worrying too much." It wasn't a question.

"No, but fretting over things you can't control won't do you any good. This isn't like you, Shepard," Kaidan said as he looked her straight in the eye. "I haven't seen you this worked up over an op since Feros - and that one was practically a running battle, start to finish. I know part of it's because colonists are involved -"

"Part of it," she agreed. "We're supposed to protect civilians, not use them as bait. I became a soldier to stop this sort of nonsense." She sounded calm enough, but there was more than a hint of frustration in her voice.

It was clear she was angry at herself for coming up with the plan in the first place. "I don't like it any more than you do, but you can't stop them from trying to defend their homes."

Shepard sighed. "You make it sound so easy. So... neat." Now she just sounded resigned and grim; it wasn't an improvement.

There was some sense that this was a piece of a puzzle, presenting a hint of a clue, just out of reach. If only he could make that leap of logic to grasp it... Colonists. Soldiers. Duty. Guilt. Mindoir? No. His eyes widened. _Elysium._

"It was what you had to do during the Skyllian Blitz, wasn't it?"

The question wiped her face clean of expression like an ocean wave flowing over sand; she might've been a statue. A forbidding silence that did not invite further discussion was her only reply, but it was an answer in and of itself.

She'd never talked much about her part in the pirate attack, now that he thought about it, though some of the story had been told in her scars, and the rest in - sanitized, he'd realized early on - news reports. For someone who'd been lauded as a hero for her actions, she didn't boast about it, and sure didn't act like she wanted praise. Not for that. It hadn't occurred to him until this moment to wonder why.

Had it been a tragedy, not triumph, for her? Kaidan knew how someone could lose even if they won, and how the dubious victory could be the more devastating, with repercussions long after the fact.

But was this the place for this - possibly one-sided - conversation? Or the time? They had a few hours to kill yet, he thought as he glanced at his omni-tool.

The commander still hadn't answered his question. The gleam of her eyes was just visible in the dim light; they narrowed as she watched him settle into a more comfortable position, making it clear to her that he wasn't going to budge.

"What happened at Elysium?" he pressed, in his most neutral tones. Because not every assault should be led with heavy explosives.

Despite how gently the question had been asked, Shepard still flinched, and seemed to shrink a little into her armor. When no answer was forthcoming, he opened his mouth, then closed it, wanting but not quite sure how to break a silence that was rapidly growing stifling. He'd learned early on that he couldn't push through her new reserve, that he had to wait until she was ready. It tested his patience at times, he had to admit, but that was the price of getting to know her again - for not being there when she needed him.

"We won," was her harsh reply, the sudden sound of her voice making him jump a little.

Kaidan eyed her closed expression; there was not a hint of pride in what had been lauded as a resounding victory. "That's... not really an answer."

She gave him a look that said it was all he was damned well getting. He tried not to let that daunting stare discourage him, and sifted through the few - the very few - real facts he knew about the Skyllian Blitz instead.

There'd been soldiers vacationing on Elysium at the time, when the slavers burned into the atmosphere of the unsuspecting planet and landed thousands - more likely just hundreds - of troops to round up the population. However many there'd really been, the enemy still badly outnumbered the defenders.

He made the calculations, checked them over, added, subtracted, divided, and came up with the same damned number three times in a row: there was no way Shepard and the rest of the surviving soldiers could have fought off the invaders by themselves - without rallying the civilians.

And there was the answer to the puzzle, plain as day. Kaidan contemplated it, prodded it, looked it over from every angle, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do with it now.

That was always the problem with answers.

_Eden Prime isn't the same as Elysium_, he almost said, and bit the inside of his cheek to stop the careless words from tripping off his tongue.

It _was_ the same for Shepard, because she'd never really gotten over Mindoir, or Elysium, or Horizon, or the Bahak system, or all the other empty places where bustling colonies had been turned into ghost towns. Maybe they all turned into Mindoir, in her head. Personal. And the thing about things turning personal was that you lost your objectivity, and when someone like Shepard lost her objectivity, there was a good chance someone would die, and her name was at the very top of the list.

He weighed his words with care, thought hard before speaking them. "It doesn't matter if you don't want to tell me what happened there, or why you're not proud of it. I don't get it, but that's okay, because you still saved a lot of lives."

Her hoarse voice was rusty as old nails with self-disgust when she looked away and retorted, "I didn't save them. I _used_ them."

"The, the colonists? I... don't get it." Kaidan frowned when she just shrugged, still unable to meet his eyes. "So, what, you used them as bait?" he asked, deliberately provoking her in a desperate bid to shake her out of this, this brown study.

That made her flinch, and the answer seemed to be dragged from her unwilling. "As bait. Cannon fodder. Decoys. Anything I could think of to take out as many slavers as I could."

He paused as he thought it over. A panicked population, taken by surprise, would run and scatter and disrupt itself with fear, making for easy prey; he could well believe Shepard had been able to take control with a firm hand and voice, weld them into a clumsy but effective fighting force.

"And... what you did was worse than what the slavers would've done to them, without your guidance?"

Shepard was too absorbed in her memories to catch the hint of gentle irony he'd been unable to keep out of his voice, or she might've said something dry and cutting.

Ignoring him, she spoke faster now, more easily, as if she'd forgotten he was sitting there, hanging on her every word. "They were just... just bodies I could throw at the slavers. Wear them down, soften them up. Except for a few turians in the ranks, none of them had any discipline; as many were looting, burning, as were rounding up slaves."

She swallowed, her voice going raspy, as she continued, "It wasn't until after I woke up in the makeshift infirmary, when they came to visit, that I saw them as real people. Colonists, just like me. They had lives, had lovers, sons, mothers, daughters, fathers, second cousins twice removed who'd grieve for them, and they came by just to thank me for keeping them all alive after I treated them like, like things. Their gratitude... shamed me. And then they gave me a medal. I wished they'd shot me instead." Her breath huffed in a humorless laugh.

When this tide of confession seemed to have wound down, Kaidan dared to reach over and place his hand on her clenched fist. The bitter self-loathing he'd heard in her voice had near broken his heart. "It sounds like you got them all out alive. That's a good thing. You have to... you have to remember that."

Shepard sighed as she stared down at their hands. "Sacrificing myself to hate, to revenge, to hurt the universe back for all the pain it gave me - that was one thing. Sacrificing people I'd sworn an oath to protect was another. It stopped me cold. Made me think long and hard, once I healed up enough to be able to."

"I have a hard time picturing you as someone that, that..." He faltered, unable to find an appropriate term.

"Angry?" she supplied, finally looking him in the face.

Kaidan nodded. "Yeah. I guess."

Her lips twisted with self-deprecation. "Oh, I was a very angry, frustrated woman before Elysium. I just hid it better than, say, Garrus. I volunteered for the border patrols on the edges of Alliance space solely because I wanted - needed - to protect other colonists. And because I wanted any chance, any chance at all, to hit the batarians back."

There didn't seem to be anything to say to that. It was a hatred he was only just starting to come to grips with, as the Reapers strode like giant insects across Earth, burning, destroying, harvesting, for unknown and unknowable reasons, since they hadn't bothered to tell any of them. The reasons certainly wouldn't matter to the dead.

"I don't think I've ever told anyone the whole story. Told Pressly some when I was high on painkillers, but not all of it." Shepard gave him a quick glance. "It's... not something I'm proud of."

"It does explain why you wince every time someone brings up the Skyllian Blitz."

She grimaced. "Noticed that, did you?"

"Uh-huh." He glanced at her clenched fists. "You've been carrying this around for a long time."

"Huh." Her brows quirked, as if the idea had never crossed her mind. "Guess so. It's... become a part of me. Maybe not a good part, but still a part."

He squeezed her hand. "Does it feel good to finally get it all out?"

Shepard inhaled and breathed out before answering, as if she were testing a wound and was surprised to find it didn't pain her. "Yeah. Yeah, it does." She gave him a grateful, lopsided smile, one he was happy to return, and her hand relaxed, returning his grip.

"You didn't judge me when I told you about Rahna, so I sure as hell won't judge you. You know that, right?" He ducked his head to better meet her gaze. "You know you can tell me anything."

She snorted, a sign of returning humor, and gave him a look of fond exasperation. "Yeah. I see that now."

Kaidan was certain that talking things through with her had changed absolutely nothing. As the commander had said, this thing she had about colonists was a fundamental part of her. It was personal, and it always would be. Shepard wouldn't be Shepard without it, and that... that was okay, because he'd learned to accept it long ago. He'd look out for her, make sure she didn't sacrifice herself with such heedless abandon. Again.

Neither of them spoke, and the silence this time didn't choke him like the dust nearly had earlier. He let himself slide down into an untidy sprawl, his head resting against another crate, and linked his hands across his stomach; muscles unknotted after the tension drained out of him from that fraught conversation. Shepard relaxed her ramrod-straight posture, propping up a boot on the crate he was lounging on. Reaching out, he wrapped his hand around her calf and idly rubbed it up and down; the armor encasing her leg was a mild annoyance, preventing him from giving her a proper caress. She didn't seem to mind; a deep, purring hum rumbled from her chest and resonated up his arm.

The commander stirred, and dug out her lunch, offering him half. The rich scent of ham and cheese roused him enough to bring out his own, and swapped out a democratic portion with solemn dignity. Like they were enacting some old ritual of breaking bread and sharing salt after the airing of grievances. The toasted bread had gotten soft after so many hours, but it had soaked in the juices and grease, and was possibly even more delicious than when it had been fresh. He cracked open an energy drink, and they shared it between them with a blithe disregard for hygiene.

It felt good, relaxing in a rare quiet moment with his lover, enjoying good food, with no need to fill the silence with inane chatter, because at times like these, they didn't need to talk.

Simple pleasures, maybe, but they were all he had left, and he treasured them all the more for their dwindling scarcity. Kaidan knew he should feel angry or sad or both about that, but for now, he was content.

Her foot, still propped next to him, nudged him in the side when all that was left of his sandwich were a few forlorn crumbs. "You take first watch, I'll take the second."

He nodded. Giving her calf one last squeeze - damn armor - he heaved himself up onto his feet and shook off the post-meal lassitude. Shepard rose with more grace, then she leaned over and brushed her lips across his in a ghost of a kiss. A sound rumbled in the back of his throat, too quiet to be a groan, and for a moment he leaned his forehead against hers, feeling her warm breath feather his face before she stepped away. Even in the gloom, he saw her shooting a glinting glance and a hint of an enigmatic smile over her shoulder at him as she walked - no, sauntered, hips swaying to a hypnotic beat only she heard - into the back.

The breath whooshed out of his lungs in a huge sigh, and he could only shake his head at the commander's ability to get him all hot and bothered without saying a word.


	8. Chapter 8

Kaidan came awake immediately when he felt someone shaking his shoulder. His nose still full of Shepard's warm scent, he automatically reached for his pistol before his brain could intervene. There was a dull clacking beside him as Shepard got up, disentangling herself from his arms.

Liara was an old hand at waking sleeping marines, and had already withdrawn to a safe distance. A wistful look passed across her face like a racing cloud before she was all business again. "Something's happening at the dig site. I think - I'm afraid they're preparing to leave, ahead of schedule."

He stifled a curse; of course nothing ever went as planned on an op. "You're sure it's not because they're deploying their troops to ambush the colonists?" he asked as he sent out the recall order for the drones on his omni-tool.

The asari shook her head. "I don't know, but Shepard said to wake you both if I saw anything out of the ordinary."

"This could be an excellent opportunity for us to get in close, under cover of their preparations," the commander said as she checked her weapons. "So let's get moving."

Liara looked much more alert than she had that morning, and Kaidan himself was feeling pretty good. After doing a few quick stretches to work the kinks out from sleeping in his armor on a hard floor, he put on his helmet, feeling ready, even eager, to give Cerberus some payback for those soldiers and civilians they'd killed.

Before putting on her helmet, Shepard gathered him and Liara in with her eyes, and nodded. Without a word that needed to be spoken, they followed her out into a countryside covered with long shadows. It was dark enough that he had to switch to night vision so that he wouldn't stumble when he took up his position in the wedge formation.

As the commander had predicted, they ran out of decent cover half a klick away from the dig site, and then there was nothing for it but to make for the target at a fast jog. The pace seemed glacial slow to him for the amount of ground they had to cross, but they had to arrive in shape to fight if need be, not exhausted. The slapping and crunching as tall stalks of grass whipped at their legs sounded deafening in the silence, drowned out only by the rhythmic noise of his harsh breathing in the confines of his helmet. Sweat poured down his face, making him itch like crazy, before the tiny ventilators blew his skin dry.

The crater seemed brighter than usual, even accounting for his helmet's night vision, but the red laser scopes of sniper rifles concerned him more than the moving beams of giant spotlights, stark white towers glowing against the night sky. He counted those vigilant dots sweeping back and forth, and thought there were fewer of those shadows tonight, with large gaps between. Wishful thinking? Maybe.

They paused in the lee of a flat boulder, all three of them crowding in together with no regard for personal space, when they heard footsteps crunching on the flattened grass.

Only one trooper making the rounds, when Kaidan had seen three in every patrol the previous evening. "Shepard..." he murmured.

"Yeah, I see him," the commander said. "It's just like we thought - they had to reduce their forces here in order to launch the ambush. Come on."

He didn't relax until they had penetrated the outer perimeter of patrols and reached the shadow of one of the outer prefabs.

"Should we split up?" Liara asked. "According to your report, the data is split, stored at two different locations."

"Wait, why do we have to get the data at all? Can't we just snatch the stasis pod and run like hell?" he asked the archaeologist.

The asari shook her head. "We don't know how to open the pod without it, and without knowing which location has the correct repository, we have to access both. Besides, we might be able to find more information about the Crucible even if we didn't need it."

"Yeah... yeah, you're right." He frowned under his helmet. "I wonder why Cerberus hasn't figured it out yet? I mean, they're a lot of things, but they're not stupid when it comes to reverse engineering alien tech."

"Aw, crap," Shepard breathed in a tone of growing surmise. She began to bang her head gently against one of the prefab's supports.

"What?" Kaidan and Liara asked in unison while the commander muttered _shit, shit, shit_ under her breath in time to the bumps. He put his hand on Shepard's shoulder to stop her from hurting herself.

Shepard turned towards them. "Remember the Prothean beacons?"

"Of course - how could I forget?" Liara said. "They were encoded -" Her eyes widened and her voice slowed as understanding dawned. "They were encoded to be understood only by Protheans, and you couldn't comprehend them, not clearly, not until you received the Cipher from Shiala."

"That's why Cerberus hasn't figured it out yet - they don't have the Cipher." Kaidan looked at the commander, a grin hidden under his helmet. "They'll never be able to open it, not without both Shiala _and_ someone who's survived communicating with a Prothean beacon, and what're the odds of that, huh? That, that's great!"

"No, it's not!" Shepard growled. "You ever had a library the size of a small moon drop into your skull? I didn't think so."

He squeezed her arm, reminded that she'd saved him from getting sucked in by the beacon after he'd foolishly gotten too close. "Sorry, but I guess this doesn't really change anything - we still need to go after both pieces. It might be faster to split up, but my gut says we shouldn't."

The commander nodded. "Thanks to Cerberus moving up their timetable, Team Two's not here yet, so we're on our own. I don't dare break radio silence to contact them - it's imperative they keep any potential reinforcements confused and tied up with their ambush. We've gotta stay together and look out for each other."

Liara raised her painted-on brows. "Well, of course. Doesn't that go without saying?"

Kaidan chuckled. "It sure does. C'mon, let's go."

They reached the nearest of the labs holding the Prothean data without incident, but their progress was checked by the presence of three Cerberus troopers - two of them specialists - at the entrance. There were no convenient holes in their line Liara could slip through: one was just outside the door, the second was standing on a stack of crates in front of the window, and the last was just out of Kaidan's sight, in front of another opening.

The commander made a hand sign, and they dispersed to find hiding places. Kaidan swiped his omni-tool over a door lock to a prefab across the way, and slipped inside what looked to be an office. Drawers had been pulled out of desks, printouts and data pads lay scattered everywhere, and dried stains marked where coffee mugs had been spilled; it took him a few minutes to navigate through the detritus without making any noise. At least there were no bodies. He reached the other door and slid it open a crack so that he could observe the sentries.

On his HUD, the green icons marking Shepard and Liara slowed and stopped. It looked like Liara was hiding behind the prefab he was in, but the commander had somehow worked her way behind the enemy.

"The second we engage them, the alert's gonna sound," Shepard murmured over the comm. "So we'll hit 'em hard and fast, and run like hell for the other repository."

Kaidan was startled, and wondered if the commander hoped to get their part of the mission over and done with fast enough to join Team Two. "What? We're not waiting for Team Two's distraction? Aren't we just here to get into position?"

"I didn't expect them to deplete their forces this much," Shepard replied. "Look at them, Kaidan. Their patrols are down to one man instead of three, and only three are standing guard here, when there should be a minimum of five - six! - to watch the approaches. They've pared their defenses down to the bone. We'd be crazy not to take advantage of that."

It was a compelling argument, but... why wasn't he convinced? "How're we supposed to get the Prothean out without Team Two's cover fire? Cortez won't be enough. And we still need to take care of those turrets."

"That Cerberus shuttle might still down there... and, well, it won't be the first enemy craft we've hijacked," the commander pointed out. He snorted at her demonstration of understatement.

"You're assuming a lot," Kaidan retorted. "And you know what they say about assumptions."

"Cerberus must be readying the Prothean for transport - for all we know the pod has already been loaded." From the suppressed enthusiasm - or panic - in her voice, Liara seemed quite taken by the idea, though he doubted her reasons were the same as Shepard's. "Instead of transferring it to ours, wouldn't it save us ever so many steps and time if we simply steal the shuttle?"

"And any Prothean artifacts that just happen to be loaded, too?" he said, voice dry. "If it's there in the first place."

"Well..." The archaeologist's voice trailed off into an embarrassed silence.

"Even if it's not there, I trust Cortez - he's gotten us out of much hotter LZs. Let's do it," the commander said, and he didn't mistake the crispness of her voice; she was done discussing the matter.

In the end, he had to follow orders - her orders. His unease didn't matter.

"Okay. Snipers?" he asked, craning his neck to look for those slippery shadows.

"There aren't any here - we passed them in the outer ring of prefabs," Liara told him.

"That'll change, so you keep your head down," Kaidan retorted. "Shepard and I'll keep 'em busy - we'll watch your back while you get that data."

"Get in there the second we tell you, Liara," the commander said. "And for God's sake, don't stop to read - get it all downloaded, and you can write as many thesis papers as you like at your leisure."

He heard Liara take a deep breath. "Okay - oh, wait, patrol!"

Kaidan froze as the Cerberus trooper came into sight, the glowing yellow slits on his helmet sweeping towards Kaidan's hiding place. He didn't breathe again until the trooper finished exchanging acknowledgements with the sentries and went past.

A minute later, the green icon representing Shepard began to creep forward. "I'll get the trooper, Kaidan."

"Right, I've got the centurion."

He waited for the commander to make the first move, and wasn't disappointed when he heard a thud a moment later, as of one body impacting another, on the far side of the prefab, then the sounds of a scuffle.

"Now, Liara! Go!" Kaidan hissed, and turned his full attention to his target. Out of the corner of his eye, the asari's icon raced towards their target, trusting him and the commander to cover her. He would not betray that trust.

The centurion turned towards the noise, leaving him wide open for Kaidan's electronic blow to his shield emitters. His surprised scream punctuated the unmistakeable crack of breaking bones, but Kaidan wasn't done; his hand twitched a mnemonic, the eezo nodules in his body sent a familiar, electrifying thrill all along his nerves, and a blue biotic field appeared, covering the centurion from head to toe. He staggered back and fell off the crates he had been standing on.

The third sentry, an engineer, began to unsling the turret from his back, but out of the dark strode Shepard like an avenging angel, a shotgun in her hands instead of the traditional flaming sword, but it was no less effective as she blasted the machine at near point-blank range. The spectacular explosion knocked the engineer back, destroying his shields and killing him instantly. Shrapnel had been driven into his head and torso, some pieces pierced clear through the other side of his body.

Another boom of the shotgun did for the dying centurion still writhing and shrieking on the ground; the sinister click as the commander ejected the heat sink seemed very loud in the silence that fell. Kaidan glanced at the body of the trooper, noting the unnatural angle of his head, on his way to join her at the entrance to the lab.

Inside, Liara was standing in front of a computer connected with messy masses of cables to smaller glowing versions of the pillars outside. Strings of data flew by with dizzying speed on the big monitor above the console as the archaeologist's fingers danced at a feverish tempo over holographic keys.

"How's it going, Liara?" Shepard asked as she switched to her pistol and kept an eye out for enemy reinforcements.

There was an irritable edge in the asari's voice when she snapped, "It's going. I'm downloading as fast as my omni-tool can process the data streams."

"Overclock the data input processors and upgrade the buffer size next time," Kaidan put in. "Might wanna run a defrag while you're at it, too. It's amazing how much efficiency you can squeeze out if you optimize the memory structures on a regular basis." He could sense Shepard rolling her eyes even if he couldn't see it.

"I'll bear that in mind the next time we must infiltrate enemy territory in order to steal vital intel," Liara retorted, shooting an exasperated look at him over her shoulder.

"You have to admit, it happens more often than not," he pointed out.

The asari paused. "You're right. Maybe I really should look into a full upgrade."

"I can send you some recommendations."

Liara waved a dismissive hand. "Just buy it for me - I'll transfer the credits to your account."

"I do love spending other people's credits -" The wail of a siren interrupted him. "Well, there goes our welcome."

"Liara!" Shepard barked.

"Yes, yes," the asari muttered. "Yes, got it! Let's go!"

They jogged - not ran - to the other data repository. He and Shepard were marines, veterans of hundreds of firefights, and they kept Liara from running ahead, from exhausting herself to no good purpose. Their caution gave Cerberus time to set up hasty blockades, though, lining the tiny streets and plazas with turrets and wall-to-wall guardian shields. Red laser dots wavered and played across his armor; he dodged aside as those distant sniper rifles boomed. Flying chips of hot metal pelted him.

A lethal rain of bullets chased them as they all dove into a prefab, rattling on the wall like ball bearings dropped onto a tin sheet.

"Defenses pared down to the bone, huh?" Kaidan said as he put his back to the closed door. A quick glance around the room told him they weren't in a good defensive position; there were too many windows and doors to watch.

The commander propped her arm on a windowsill and returned fire with her pistol while her free hand twitched a mnemonic. A shield flew by; there was a scream as her shots went home. "They're relying on turrets to make up for numbers, so it's not like I was wrong."

"Doesn't change the fact that they've got us trapped."

Kaidan moved to another window, thinking of finding the engineers who'd set up those turrets and seeing if he could take them out, or at least getting a decent headcount of the enemy, when something small flew through the opening and bounced on the floor. It chirped.

"Grenade!" Liara yelled.

It was beeping too fast for him to do a return to sender; he vaulted over a desk, knocking a terminal and several data pads to the floor, and curled into a ball. A second later, the grenade exploded; his helmet muffled the sound of the blast, and the mesh of tiny cables that made up his suit puffed up, absorbing the concussive force that hadn't been blocked by the sturdy table.

"Everyone okay?" the commander asked, her voice barely audible through what felt like layers of cotton in his ears before the medi-gel-filled foam in his helmet deflated.

His right eye shivered; Liara's and Shepard's icons expanded into medical readouts in the corner of his HUD. To his relief, all the lights were green. "Yeah, I'm -"

"Shepard!" the archaeologist called.

Liara's singularity blossomed in the other doorway, preventing some guardians from shuffling in and gaining a foothold behind them. He got to his feet and launched himself at the moving wall of linked shields, being careful not to step into the influence of the field himself as he lay down some suppressing fire with his assault rifle. The distinctive wooden-door-slamming reports of their Talon pistols were loud in the confined space, and he grunted as several large-caliber bullets impacted against his barrier.

The commander turned from watching their flank long enough to pull off a mnemonic that stripped the hapless Cerberus soldiers of their shields, yanking them off-balance and leaving them vulnerable to the sparking biotic field Kaidan drew over them. Ignoring the screams, Liara took the next practiced step in the familiar dance of death, and made a clenching fist gesture at the men trying to level their wavering pistols in their direction. The opposing oscillation of the asari's field met his with explosive results, and he winced as the sound of the detonation rolled over him. The enemy soldiers went flying back like so many broken dolls, knocking down the others who had been advancing behind them. Liara shut the door on the confusion in Cerberus's ranks, and burned out the control panel with her omni-tool, but that wouldn't hold the enemy off for long.

"Shepard, we can't stay here," Kaidan said, well aware he was stating the obvious. "That's not gonna stop 'em for long."

Any other group would've known they were outmatched, and should retreat to lick their wounds, but Cerberus would fight to the death, climbing over the corpses of their own to drag their enemies down if necessary. Like husks, he tried not to think. Not for the first time, he wondered what the Illusive Man had done to give his troops the tenacity of the religious fanatics of a thankfully bygone era.

"I know!" the commander snapped over her shoulder. "I know. Okay, fine - if we can't go through or around, we'll go up!"

Squeezing off one last shot before holstering her pistol, Shepard vaulted over the windowsill she'd been using to stabilize her aim, and beckoned to them. Kaidan jumped out and found the rungs bolted to the outside, then turned to give Liara a hand before scrambling up the side of the prefab.

All of this activity drew unwelcome attention; a new volley of gunfire focused on Shepard's exposed position. The commander's icon on his HUD blinked as her own barrier took damage, spurring him to take the last few rungs at a rush and throw himself forward so that he slid on his belly to the edge of the roof. Switching his assault rifle from semi-automatic to full auto, he propped it on the ledge, slammed the trigger back and sprayed the ranks of white and yellow armor packed below him; the weapon bucked and grew hot in his hands, but he kept it steady, and he didn't let up until it forced him to stop in order to eject the heat sink.

Something small was thrown at him; he batted it away with his biotics in sheer reflex before he even realized it was a frag grenade. It fell back out of sight, and detonated, he calculated, in mid-air, to the consternation of those in its immediate radius. Another one followed in a shallow trajectory, too fast for him to toss back, and it bounced into the corner. His mouth gone dry, he lurched up into a clumsy crouch for the opposite direction, terror-driven adrenaline lending his barrier the strength it would need to withstand the explosion. He hoped.

Then someone was hauling him away, hard enough to almost throw him. The concussion wave of the grenade rolled over them; they were far enough away that it rolled off his hardsuit and barrier, causing minimal damage. _That was close._ He turned to see that it was Shepard who had him by the arm, pointing to the roof of the next prefab over. There were a few new marks on her armor, but she seemed otherwise fine. With her hand still on his arm, they both jumped the gap to the top of the other prefab.

Liara was already there, crouching down and aiming her submachine gun at a turret. Its shield emitters sparked and sputtered, but before it could turn its barrel around to retaliate, the commander tossed a grenade, taking out both the machine and the engineer who had been about to repair it. The biotic detonation that occurred when Kaidan tossed dark energy behind him at the engineer's stunned comrades was almost redundant. They took advantage of the lull to run.

James's cheerful voice bellowed in Kaidan's ear, nearly causing him to miss his next jump, "Aw, you guys started the party without us?"

"James!" Shepard barked. "Don't land anywhere near here! We haven't taken out the anti-aircraft guns yet!"

"I know, I know, gimme a little credit, geez. We dropped EDI off a while ago, and we've been waiting to see if she could do anything about 'em. Hey, EDI, how's it comin'?"

"Please stand by," EDI replied, sounding so much like Avina that it had to be a deliberate mockery.

They ran out of convenient rooftops at this point, forcing them to drop back down onto the ground. The speed with which they'd escaped the trap had let them outdistance the majority of Cerberus's forces left at the dig site; only the nemesis snipers were fast enough to keep up, and they couldn't do a thing if their targets ducked behind prefabs. Shepard took point and Kaidan watched their backs, keeping Liara in the protected middle, because the troopers would catch up eventually.

That duty didn't distract Shepard from debriefing the other marine. "While EDI's doing whatever it is she's doing, James, report."

"Uh, yeah," the other man said, "about that..."

The evasive note in the lieutenant's voice raised Kaidan's eyebrows, because James had never been one to prevaricate. "Is everyone all right?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah, everyone's present and accounted for -"

James was let off the hook for a brief moment when the commander froze, then motioned for them to get down. Kaidan's hopes that the second data repository would be unguarded were dashed when he saw not three, but six guards: a centurion, an engineer, two troopers, and two guardians. It was obvious the enemy had figured out what they were after. He wondered why they hadn't simply destroyed the computer or wiped the data, then told himself he should just count his blessings. Maybe they'd thought they could get a breakthrough eventually, if they just threw enough resources and credits at it. That seemed like the Illusive Man's style.

Cortez's voice sounded in his ear. "Commander, three Cerberus shuttles are in the air and on their way to your location."

"This night just keeps getting better and better," Kaidan muttered.

He bit down on the food tube in his helmet with unnecessary force. The bland paste was chock-full of nutrients that would replenish his energy, but it did little to take away the bad taste in his mouth. No plan survived contact with the enemy, he knew that, but he felt the contingencies unraveling even faster than usual tonight.

"Permission to engage?" Cortez was asking.

"Denied, Cortez," the commander answered. "You're our getaway ride and our eye in the sky."

"Roger that," the pilot said, unable to keep a trace of disappointment out of his voice before he signed off. "Cortez out."

"Sorry 'bout that, Shepard," James cut in, "I thought it was more important to keep the colonists safe than run down every single one of those bastards. It all got a little crazy, in the dark."

"It's okay, James, you did the right thing."

"Um, so I was telling you -"

The commander cut him off. "Not now, Lieutenant - we're right outside the lab with the second half of the data, and I'd really like to get the drop on them before they notice us."

James sounded relieved. "Right, right. We'll be waiting for your all-clear. Vega out."

"I suppose there's no room for subtlety," Liara said as she sized up the opposition.

Shepard just hummed. "Maybe not on our end, but... EDI?"

"Yes, Commander?"

"Everything sorted out? Think you can you take care of those shuttles and give us a little distraction at the same time?"

"Assuming direct control," the AI intoned in answer.

"EDI," Shepard sighed in weary exasperation.

"That was a joke. _This_, however, is not."

Even though the AA guns were on the other side of the settlement, it was small enough that Kaidan heard the barrage clearly. The enemy shuttles exploded, lighting up the night, making a fine show to distract the sentries. As always, Shepard seized the tactical moment, and Kaidan followed right on her metaphorical heels.

A singularity bloomed behind the two troopers in the back, dragging them screaming into a swirling blue maw; the dark energy Kaidan called into being spun and coalesced, and ate away at the enemy soldiers. With inevitable and unstoppable swiftness, in a span of time that measured when one raindrop followed another, the two pieces of dark matter, each of an opposing polarity, touched. The violence of that meeting propelled the two men suspended in the vortex into their fellows, and the shockwave flattened the rest.

Kaidan put his free hand on the archaeologist's back, encouragement and push in one, but with the irresistable promise of more Prothean data dangling before her, she hardly needed either. Liara rushed ahead and shouldered aside the dazed sentries still standing with a determination an American football player of yore would've envied.

The four Cerberus soldiers who still survived recovered faster than expected; a centurion threw a grenade, cloaking them in billowing clouds of smoke. Kaidan cursed, and ran in side by side with Shepard. Until the smoke dispersed, it would be down to hand-to-hand combat; neither side would risk hitting their own, and they couldn't leave Liara vulnerable if they waited for it to fade on its own.

There was a buzz and a pained grunt as someone hit Shepard with a shock baton; Kaidan struck out at the dim shadows surrounding him with the stock of his assault rifle, reduced to using the expensive weapon like a club. Each hard return blow shredded his barrier a little more as he made his way to her side, because he could still see the commander's icon on his HUD even if he couldn't see her or the enemy. Whatever the chemicals Cerberus used in their smoke grenades, they rendered even infrared useless.

They stood back to back; he sensed the familiar tide of her dark energy reaching out, then felt the electric thrill as it flowed and intersected with his, shoring up his failing protections even as his power did the same for hers. It felt as comforting as a grip of her hand. From the shelter of both of their barriers, they fended off their attackers as best they could.

It came as something of a shock when an electronic modulated voice barked an order and the pressure let up, at about the same time the last of the smoke dispersed. Kaidan blinked as the Cerberus soldiers surrounding them suddenly fell back, revealing the turret an engineer must've set up in all the confusion.

"Shit!" Kaidan snarled, and dove to one side while Shepard sprang in the opposite direction. It was an almost physical wrench to feel her biotic field split off from his.

The turret was confused for a split second as it tried to track both of them, but the Cerberus soldiers were not so limited; semi-automatic rifle fire chased him into the flimsy cover of a railing that used to hold up boxes of flowers. According to his HUD, the commander had taken refuge behind a tall shipping crate across from the lab, but she hadn't gotten away unscathed; her icon automatically morphed into a medical readout and blinked an unsettling amber, but the surprisingly quiet sound of Shepard's pistol told him she wasn't too injured to fight.

He couldn't worry about that right now - his job was to take care of enemy shield emitters, and so he focused on the centurion, both the squad leader and the owner of those annoying smoke grenades. Poking his head up for the brief second he needed to flash his omni-tool at the target, an elegant little program ran on the overclocked microframe, and was rewarded when he heard a pained grunt and the wonderful sounds of electronics frying.

Counting to three, Kaidan popped back up just as the turret had to reload, about to follow up with a burst from his assault rifle, when the centurion's head exploded into gory chunks. He stared for half a second, then switched to the turret, even as a twitch of his left eye called up a map of the dig site on his HUD and... yes, there was another green icon, located a quarter of a klick distant: Garrus, with his usual impeccable timing, and even more impeccable aim. He grinned.

The loss of their leader and the apparent appearance of an enemy in their unprotected rear sowed confusion among the survivors, now down to two - three if the turret was included. Quick to scent blood in the water, Shepard launched herself out of cover, a shotgun in her hands now instead of a pistol. Kaidan continued to whittle away at the turret's defenses in a dangerous and lethal game of peekaboo, sending off a burst every now and then to scare off the engineer who kept trying to repair it. It was imperative that he keep their attention on him and not on the commander.

There were two metallic barks as Shepard blew away the last guardian; Kaidan had a vague memory of shields flying like giant square frisbees while he'd been dancing oh-so-delicately around with the turret. Speaking of which... Its shield emitters finally destroyed, he made a fist and punched the air at the sparking turret, and he nodded satisfaction at a job well done when it exploded under the biotic blow.

Liara rejoined them in time to take out the lone engineer still putting up a futile fight. Kaidan almost felt sorry for the poor bastard, who came at them with nothing but his Talon pistol. Almost. Remembering the bodies he'd seen dumped in a ditch, and others that had been left on floors and draped over desks like so much discarded laundry, he overloaded the engineer's shield emitters with ruthless efficiency. A single blast of Shepard's shotgun granted an instant death, which was more mercy than Cerberus had given most of its victims.

Then it was time for the mad scramble to the stasis pod - if it was still on the planet. They could hear gunfire and explosions in the direction of the crater, interspersed with stacatto bursts from the AA guns. Kaidan hoped they were still under EDI's control. Still, as he cocked one ear to listen to the distant sounds, there seemed to be something - not wrong, exactly, but... off.

He'd fought with the others often enough that he could identify them simply from the sounds of the weapons they favored; the _Normandy_ armory boasted quite an eclectic collection of fine firearms of all types and sizes, gathered from all across the galaxy - much like its crew - and they had all taken advantage of it. No other group used such a varied lot, not even Cerberus, with all its resources. So it puzzled him when he heard other kinds of guns in the mix: the soft _blams_ of Phalanx pistols and the high-pitched chirping of Avenger rifles.

"James, report," Shepard said as they followed her through a prefab. They had lost contact with the Cerberus forces for the moment, thanks to Team Two's distraction. "You were trying to tell me something earlier."

"Yanno those colonists Cerberus was gonna ambush?"

The commander sounded impatient. "Of course I do - I'm the one who ordered you to stop them."

"Well, they, uh, they sorta followed us here. The colonists, I mean, not Cerberus. So... yeah. Can we keep 'em, Mom?" James said with a nervous laugh.

A frigid silence answered the lieutenant. Like nearly everyone else when faced with one of Shepard's black hole silences, James attempted to fill it.

"Honestly, Commander, I couldn't stop 'em, not without shooting 'em. They're out for blood, especially after I showed their leader those Cerberus reports after all the dust settled. It was easier to just let 'em come along."

With her helmet on, Shepard couldn't exactly rub her face, but Kaidan got the impression she really wanted to. She dashed into the cover of another empty prefab instead. "James, you weren't supposed to show them those logs."

"Things kinda got a little... tense when we nabbed Cambiata, see. Turns out he's the colony physician, knows everyone by name, hands out lollipops to their kids, looks like everyone's _abuelo_ - and when they saw a buncha scary-lookin' guys in armor - some of 'em aliens - roughing him up, well..."

"I get the picture," the commander said as she waved Kaidan and Liara through. "You must've had to do some fast talking. Very fast talking."

"With everyone still high from the fight and all the guns waving around and Cambiata screaming bloody murder the whole time? Hell, yeah, I did some fast talking." James sounded proud of himself, and he had every right to be.

They crouched now in one of the last prefabs before they'd reach the lift down into the crater; Team Two - and the compromised AA guns - had done an admirable job of luring the enemy forces stationed there away, leaving a small hole Team One could take advantage of. If they kept to the shelter of the buildings, they ought to be able to avoid the patrols.

Shepard seemed resigned by now to the danger the civilians had chosen to put themselves in. "All right, fine, they're here, but for God's sake, don't let them get any closer than they already are."

"I'm ridin' herd on 'em, don't worry. And I've got some help - turns out we're not the only Alliance soldiers here."

"You mean some of the garrison survived? That's good news!" Kaidan said as he hacked a door panel while the other two covered him.

"Shepard, be careful," Tali's lilting voice broke in. "We managed to draw away the main body of Cerberus troops, but my recon drones tell me there's a sniper on the roof -"

There was a familiar boom, then Garrus chimed in with, "Correction, there _was_ a sniper on the roof!"

"Well, there might be more, so don't forget to look up. Tali out."

The moment the hacked door slid open, Shepard charged in, but she stopped stock still on the threshold, and Liara nearly collided with her.

"Shepard?" the asari whispered, sounding uncertain. She leaned around the commander's stiff body, then Kaidan heard her say _Oh_ in a very small voice.

"They were gunned down while having drinks and watching the game," Shepard whispered.

Kaidan stepped inside, and finally saw what had arrested the commander's attention: there were dead Alliance soldiers, still in armor, sprawled on the couch and chairs. Empty beer bottles were scattered on the table and on the floor next to the bodies; plates of moldy food had been overturned and kicked into the corners. The enclosed space stank of decay.

He knelt and examined one on the floor. They had probably just gone off duty, in such a hurry to catch the game that they hadn't even taken off their armor, just some guys looking forward to some down time after a long, boring shift. Then someone had shot them in the backs of their heads after they'd gotten drunk. Two shots each. Neat. Clean. Professional. Cerberus.

"This was an inside job," Kaidan said, his tone grim as he surveyed the small living room.

"Maybe," was the commander's surprising response. "Anyone can be taken by surprise when they think they're safe."

"This was somebody's home. They damned well should've been." He gently closed the dead man's eyes, then rose to his feet. Despite the rage burning through his veins hot enough to nearly set off a biotic flare, he put his hand on Shepard's rigid shoulder and said, "We have to go."

The commander stayed still as a statue for a heartbeat, then jerked a curt nod at him, and led them past the bodies to the other exit.

"Shepard," Cortez's voice broke the angry silence. "Spotted a Cerberus squad that slipped past Team Two. I've been watching them set up turrets at key points, and they're getting real close to your location."

"Acknowledged." Shepard glanced at them over her shoulder. "You heard the man. Keep your eyes peeled and watch out for turrets."

"We should take out that squad before they get a chance to hit Team Two from behind," Kaidan said. It made tactical sense, but it also gave him an excuse to shoot something. He had never considered himself to be a vengeful man, but that scene of casual murder still bothered him. A lot.

"I certainly wouldn't like to encounter them behind _us_," Liara said.

"All right, but only if we run into them on our way," Shepard said. "And with our luck, we will," she muttered under her breath.

Thanks to Cortez's warning, they managed to sneak up on the engineers while they were in the middle of setting up their turrets, supervised by a centurion, and protected only by a single guardian. They paused in the prefab and divvied up targets; Shepard yanked away the guardian's shield, and Liara tossed him into a singularity once he'd been stripped of his protection, leaving the centurion to Kaidan.

Even with surprise on their side, that still left the two engineers and a whole lot of turrets.

"Commander!" Joker's urgent voice sounded in Kaidan's ear on the priority channel just as the centurion fell under a combination of biotics and bullets.

"Joker, this isn't a good time," Shepard said, her words punctuated by a stream of bullets from two turrets that sounded like stuttering metallic rain. "Liara," she snapped. At her hand signal, the asari ducked out the way they'd come in and started up the ladder for the high ground.

"Yeah, tell me 'bout it! But I thought you might wanna know a Cerberus ship just arrived in orbit."

"What's the profile?" Kaidan asked.

Making sure his barrier was at full strength, he threw himself forward and tumbled behind an unlovely concrete block, grunting as several of the bullets hammered into his side. His barrier and armor had protected him from some cracked ribs, not to mention holes in his hide, but he was going to regret that later. It was worth it to be able to both flank the surviving engineers and take the heat off the others. The turrets were still shooting in his direction, as their simple VIs were prone to do.

"Unknown, but ladar says it's a cargo ship of some kind: big, fat, and slow," Joker scoffed. "The _Normandy_ can fly rings around something like that. I can take care of her, no prob - uh-oh, looks like she didn't arrive empty. Something just launched - reading two energy signatures."

"Shuttles?" Shepard asked. "Leave the turrets alone, aim for the engineers!"

"Nah - too small," Joker replied.

EDI interrupted them. "Analysis indicates they are Atlas mechs, Commander - inbound on your location."

"Great. That's just great," Kaidan muttered.

"Team Two, did you get that?" Shepard asked.

"We copy," James replied, his usual exuberance dampened. "Thanks for the head's-up, Joker."

There was none of his usual insouciance when the pilot signed off with a, "Good luck, guys. Joker out."

Kaidan finished disabling one engineer's shield emitters, and ducked as one of the turrets sent a spray of bullets his way when he popped his head out. The engineer's pistol fire was almost redundant. There was a scream, followed by an explosion as Liara's biotics finished him off. Kaidan tried looking around for the other one, but decided discretion was the better part of valor when two - no, three - streams of bullets intersected where his head had been a second ago. He could just make out the sounds of Shepard's pistol, Liara's SMG, and the remaining engineer's Talon over the high-speed rattling, but he couldn't see anything, dammit. All he was good for right now was turret bait.

"Liara, use the Illium trick," the commander said, not bothering to explain this cryptic remark. "Steady... steady... now!"

Something large and circular whipped across Kaidan's view, then there was a thud and a male grunt as it hit something meaty. The turrets stopped firing on Kaidan's position and tracked the object instead, giving him the opening he needed to focus on the last engineer, who had been knocked to the ground, stunned by the table that'd been thrown at him. Kaidan's omni-tool flashed; electronic countermeasures clashed, a thousand thousand memory sectors of immeasurable size died in the struggle, and the engineer's shields shorted out when Kaidan's program proved to be the victor.

As if they had been waiting for just that, a biotic field picked up the hapless engineer and flung him right into the turrets' withering fire, blocking them and killing him at the same time. Never one to waste an opportunity, Shepard used the guardian's discarded shield to block the rest of the turrets as she and Liara dashed up to him. Kaidan was glad to finally shut the door on the emplacements, and fell in behind them.

Despite his tension, he had to ask, "Illium trick?" He sensed Shepard was rolling her eyes again. "What is it? Sounds dirty," he added in a hopeful tone of voice.

"I throw a table at someone with my biotics after Shepard has distracted them," was Liara's airy reply.

Kaidan gave this a judicious nod. "Yep, definitely dirty. In more ways than one."

"Kaidan!" the archaeologist scolded, trying to sound scandalized and failing.

They all tensed when they heard a familiar roaring noise, getting louder and closer with every second, then the earth-shaking impact as something large and heavy landed. Then they moved, opening door after door after door until they emerged from the last prefab on the edge of the crater and saw the Atlas. Kaidan scanned the area for the ground troops that usually clustered around the mech like very small chicks with a very large hen, but couldn't see any. Team Two's work, no doubt. The pilot hadn't seen them yet, but the Atlas began patrolling the edge of the crater and showed no sign of haring off after Team Two.

"James, come in. Where are the civilians?" Shepard demanded.

"They're behind us, as far away as I can keep 'em without firing a few warning shots," the lieutenant answered. "They're really, really pissed. Can't blame 'em. Sergeant Petrov's got her hands full keeping 'em under control - aw, shit!"

On the open line, Kaidan heard the same roaring and crash as the second Atlas presumably landed near Team Two's vicinity.

The commander's voice was flat and intense as she ordered, "Get the civilians to safety! They're not trained or equipped to handle an Atlas mech!"

"What? But - but what about you guys? We're your backup!" James's voice was nearly a wail.

"We don't need it." Shepard's tone turned implacable. "You have your orders, Lieutenant."

Kaidan exchanged an uneasy glance with Liara. _Yes, we do!_ They couldn't afford more delays - they needed to get that stasis pod, and they needed to get it _now_. The asari was biting her lip, as if to hold in a similar protest.

James sputtered for a second, then muttered a graceless, "Aye aye, ma'am. Vega out." What else could he do?

"Shepard..." Kaidan said, giving the commander a worried look. "What're you thinking?"


	9. Chapter 9

Shepard held up a hand. "EDI, do you read? Do you still have control of their AA guns?"

"Negative, Commander. When they could not seize back control, the Atlas at our location destroyed them."

"Damn! All right, Shepard out." She turned back to Kaidan and Liara. "So much for Plan A, but don't worry, I've got a Plan B," she assured them. "Kaidan, I need you to focus on taking down its shields, but don't fry them permanently."

He was flattered by her complete trust and confidence in his hacking skills, for everything from a door lock to geth anti-aircraft guns, but admitted, "I can't, anyway, even if I wanted to - those mechs have the most robust self-repair systems Cerberus could install."

"Do what you can," the commander said, and gave them a stern stare - what could be seen of it in her helmet. "I want all of us to concentrate our biotics and fire on the canopy protecting the pilot."

"Oh, you want to hijack it, don't you?" Liara asked. "All right," she said, with an appalling disregard for the scale of the problem.

"And after that's done, and once we've secured the stasis pod, Kaidan and I'll be helping to evacuate Team Two and the civilians." Liara did not miss the implications - and neither did he - and began to protest.

Liara kept shooting him _Feel free to jump in at any time_ glances, but he said nothing; he could hear the resolve ringing in Shepard's voice even if the asari couldn't, and decided not to waste either their time or his breath.

Shepard spoke over her objections, "Once the stasis pod is in our hands, Team One's job is done. Team Two's gonna need all the help they can get, evacuating both themselves and the civilians while under fire. Not to mention they've got an Atlas to deal with, too. You're gonna go along with Cortez to keep an eye on that thing."

The archaeologist looked torn between finally getting her hands on an actual Prothean sooner rather than later, and worry for her friends; Kaidan watched the struggle with some fascination. To her credit, the worry won out by a tiny margin. "Are you sure?"

"You said Cerberus damaged the pod, trying to open it - or maybe excavating it, who knows - but that's why we need someone to monitor it." The asari gave this an unhappy nod.

Kaidan decided to toss the archaeologist a bone - and tease her at the same time. "Besides, Liara, you'll be able to take more stuff if Shepard and I aren't there to take up space."

Shepard cut off Liara's indignant spluttering by making a hand signal. They took their positions, spreading out so that the Atlas would be caught in their crossfire. Kaidan started the party first, sending his electronic minions into the breach once more with a wave of his omni-tool. That got the Atlas's attention, and biotics and bullets soon burst like fireworks in his night vision. Smoke grenades obscured the mech, but they knew how slow it moved, and where it was by the sounds of its heavy footsteps, and spent thermal clips like water as they continued to shoot at it through the camouflage.

When the smoke cleared, Kaidan was horrified to see Shepard engaging the Atlas with her shotgun instead of her pistol, just out of range of the mech's claw arm - but not its rocket launcher and cannon. She'd been injured earlier, and it showed as stiffness as she lunged aside from a missile and rolled to her feet with her shotgun blazing. The Atlas spun, ponderous as an elephant, trying to track her. It would be comical, if he weren't terrified.

Preoccupied with the commander flitting around it like a very small wolf with big teeth, the Atlas ignored Kaidan when he sprinted over to Liara's position. "Liara!"

"I see her!" The same mouth-dessicating fear he felt was mirrored in Liara's wide eyes.

"Gimme your omni-tool! Now!" The urgency in his voice had her thrusting her arm out at him, even as it confused the hell out of her. "I can slave your omni-tool to mine -" He paused, but continued to type. "Sorry, but there's a chance this might wipe all your data files, if not destroy your omni-tool outright."

"Do what you have to do." She hesitated. "If you have the capacity, I'd appreciate it if you copied them over to yours first. I haven't had a chance to collate my notes and store them with Glyph," she added, and gave him full access.

Kaidan forced himself to focus on the task, even as he heard the booming sounds of Shepard's shotgun and the heavy thumps as the Atlas stomped around, trying to catch her.

As quick as he could, he compared his omni-tool and Liara's; not the same brand, but every omni-tool was the same on a fundamental level, only differentiating themselves in proprietary software and the modules the customer chose to install. It was unsurprising that Liara's military-grade omni-tool was focused on data processing, superior search functionality, and storage capacity, not dissimilar to his own. He could work with that. As promised, he copied her files first, and had just enough free space to accommodate them all.

"Okay," he said as he worked, fingers flying over the holographic keypad. "I've copied my ECM programs to your omni-tool, and you should be able to use them to short out the Atlas's shield emitters just like I can. The problem is power - our omni-tools need to recharge in between - you know it takes a lot of juice to transmit that much complex data in such a short time."

"I didn't know you could do that."

"I got the idea when Tali gave Shepard some ECM programs she wrote, tailored to Alliance military-issue omni-tools."

Kaidan couldn't help sighing in memory at Shepard's indifference to the quarian's extraordinary effort; the synergy Tali had created, coupling Alliance computing power with quarian ingenuity, not to mention overcoming the myriad differences between operating systems in both architecture and language, had warranted so much more than just the commander's polite thanks. He'd taken it upon himself to heap tons of profuse praise on Tali, and also to pass them along to the Alliance's techs.

More technical elaboration had to wait as he finished his necessarily crude conversion, and he tried not to wince at his own work.

What was elegant in its simplicity on his omni-tool was inefficient as hell, riddled with memory leaks, and a mess of unequal compromises on Liara's, but it would do the trick, if with far less effectiveness. Better than nothing.

"There. I've turned your omni-tool into a crude copy of mine, so you can help strip shields while mine's recharging."

"Then let's get to work," Liara said, mimicking Shepard's voice and tone.

Despite himself, Kaidan gave her a fierce grin he wished she could see under his helmet. "Yeah."

It had taken a couple of minutes to reprogram Liara's omni-tool, but Shepard was still engaged in her lethal dance with her shambling, ponderous partner, and by some miracle hadn't yet been reduced to a smear on the ground. Long familiarity with the commander's movements told him she was tiring, as even Shepard's enhanced strength and endurance were not so modified as to overcome certain physical constraints.

Sparks flew as he and Liara set their programs to work; the Atlas's shield emitters blew under the invisible electronic onslaught, then it was time to join in with their guns and biotics - from a sane distance. Shepard manipulated the mech around so that they'd have a clear shot at the canopy, then feinted and dove for the cover she should've been behind the whole time. He was relieved to hear pistol shots ring out from this protected position.

The eezo nodes in Kaidan's body flared again and again, sending a wave of tingling prickles itching under his skin and behind his eyes each time he formed dark matter; his nose began to bleed, sending a warm wash down over his lips and chin, mixing with his sweat, and his gasping mouth tasted of iron rust. The leaden sensation he could feel dragging at him was counteracted by adrenaline and a nasty cocktail of chemicals his hardsuit injected, but like his almost-cracked ribs, he was going to pay for it all later. For now, all that mattered was destroying that canopy - not what it cost him. The night air - it was still hours before dawn on Eden Prime, but it felt like they'd been here forever - reverberated with deep booms as their biotics detonated.

They were all rewarded for their diligence when they heard the whistle of pressurized air escaping, and that was all it took for Shepard to literally leap into the exposed weak spot. She was pulling out the dead pilot when Kaidan and Liara caught up to her. Even through the filters, the air stank of fried electronics, the chemicals in those smoke grenades, and ozone.

"Liara, go see if you can find where they stashed the stasis pod - it's gotta be around here somewhere, or they wouldn't drop such an expensive asset right on this spot," the commander said. The asari nodded and went to investigate the computer by the lift.

Giving the Atlas's stained cockpit a dubious glance, he asked, "Shepard, do you even know how to drive one of those things?" He tasted blood as he spoke, and resisted an impulse to spit; there was nowhere for it to go in his helmet, so he swallowed it instead.

Stung, she looked down at him from where she was perched on one of the mech's legs and retorted, "Then _you_ drive, Mr. Smartypants!"

He sputtered, not unlike how James had earlier. "But - but I don't know how to drive one of these things, either!"

Hopping down, Shepard patted his shoulder, then formed her hands into a stirrup for him and boosted him into the cockpit. "You're the tech expert - you'll figure it out."

Settling inside the tiny space, Kaidan tried to ignore the stench of blood and hot metal as he examined the controls. "Well, I guess I can."

"I mean, Cerberus troopers can drive them, it can't be that hard."

Busy with studying the systems and then hacking through certain fail-safes, her comment didn't register for a second. "Hey!"

Through her visor, he could see her eyes crinkling at his outrage. She turned and called, "Liara?"

"The shuttle is gone, but the stasis pod is still here," Liara said in disbelief. "Along with a great deal of artifacts still to be loaded."

"Must've been diverted to the ambushing forces," Shepard said, attempting to head off academic outrage.

The commander's efforts were in vain. Liara was spluttering as she tapped at the console, "Unsorted, uncataloged - unacceptable!"

Shepard looked at the fulminating asari, shook her head, then called for their ride. Cortez swooped in half a minute later to the bottom of the lift. Together, he and Liara began to maneuver the stasis pod into the cargo bay, the pilot bearing up with great patience under the asari's oft-repeated instructions to be careful as they began to pile in all they could fit of the boxes of artifacts Cerberus had collected for transport.

"I wonder why they didn't transfer the pod as soon as they found it," Kaidan mused aloud as he and Shepard watched them - and over them - from the crater's lip.

"They only discovered it a few days ago," the commander answered. She waved at the crater, which represented an enormous amount of removed earth, all of which had had to be sifted. "You can sorta see why. And for something this important, they'd want some serious escorts - which even the Illusive Man can't pull out of his ass on short notice."

"Yeah, that's true. And I hear there're already vultures looking to take advantage on the fringes of the war." He grimaced, knowing she could sense it even if she couldn't see it. Elanos Haliot had scraped up an appalling number of the same sort of scum to attack Elysium.

"Looks like they're done loading. Team Two, come in," the commander said.

James's voice crackled in Kaidan's ear. "This is Team Two, we read you." He sounded calm enough, even though Kaidan could hear shouts and gunfire in the background.

"The clock's struck midnight."

Kaidan could almost see the exhilarated grin on James's face as he acknowledged the code phrase that told the others both that their mission was a success and that it was time to withdraw. "We read you loud and clear, ma'am."

"We're bringing our own pumpkin," Shepard added with suppressed amusement as she looked up at Kaidan. He attempted to give her the finger with the Atlas's claw arm in reply. "And you'll need to make some space in your carriage for us, so send us the coordinates."

"Uh, okay," was James's puzzled reply. "Transmitting coordinates."

"And the civilians? Any casualties?" Shepard asked in a more serious tone.

"Some minor injuries, no deaths. Sarge's got 'em all in hand."

There was no amusement in the commander's voice now. "Get them out with all safe speed."

"Aye aye, ma'am! Vega out."

"All right, Kaidan, just you and me now," Shepard said as they watched the shuttle depart. "Let's go."

"What's the plan?" he asked as he started the mech marching after her. The cockpit was actually quite comfortable, to his surprise, and didn't transmit vibrations when the Atlas took one ground-shaking step after another.

"We'll hit the Cerberus troops pressuring Team Two from behind, give them some breathing space. With any luck, they won't realize it's not one of their own in your Atlas until it's too late. And after that, improvise like hell."

Kaidan let his voice go very dry. "We've had a lot of practice at that tonight." He had to admit it had worked out - so far.

Shepard had hurried on ahead of him as the sounds of gunfire grew nearer. Now she beckoned to him with impatient waves of her hand. "C'mon, Kaidan, can't you get that oversized bucket of bolts to move any faster? I mean, good grief, it'll be a new galactic cycle by the time we get to Team Two!"

"I'm going as fast as this thing can!" The slowness of the mech was very annoying, especially compared to Shepard's quick pace, who had taken point almost by default.

When the sounds of fighting grew clearer, and they saw flashes of gunfire and the smoking comet tail of a missile, the commander swarmed up a ladder and took up a perch on the roof of a prefab. Kaidan kept the mech moving. "I see them. The other Atlas is still up and running, but looking a lot worse for wear. Cerberus ground troops have take up their usual formations around it."

"Wait, I'm supposed to take on an Atlas with one that has a broken window?" His barrier felt very flimsy at that moment.

Her confidence in him never wavered. "Not if you don't miss," she said, and he couldn't detect a hint of mockery or irony in her statement.

Kaidan blew out his breath. They only had one chance to take out the enemy mech before those Cerberus troops realized the attacking force in their rear was all of two people. Well, two people and an Atlas. They wouldn't break and scatter from the ambush like normal soldiers caught with their pants down; they'd turn and overwhelm him and the commander with sheer numbers in an eyeblink. He also knew Shepard had come to the same conclusion, and that she had a line of retreat - or three - already mapped out.

With all the ruckus both Team Two and the enemy were making, they could perhaps be forgiven if none of them heard the roar of the missile launching from Kaidan's Atlas. It hit the exhaust port on the back of the other Atlas square on; the mech exploded, taking out several troopers that had been advancing too close to it.

"Nice!" James shouted over the comm.

"That was beautiful! Beautiful!" was Garrus's enthusiastic contribution.

Kaidan ignored them as he halted the mech out in the open, and swept the Atlas's cannon back and forth across the enemy's front line. Cerberus soldiers fell, some knocked down by the force of the projectiles, others blown apart by lucky shots. A singularity appeared right in the middle of their formation, pulling in several of the troopers, before expelling its contents with great force when the biotic field was detonated. The Atlas finished fabricating and loading another missile, and he sent it towards a group of engineers clustered around a few turrets that had Tali and EDI pinned down.

He didn't wait for Shepard's quiet order to clamber out of the open cockpit and follow her while their enemies were still in shambles. He'd seen the centurions out there, hiding behind their damned effective smoke screens, and knew they would get their men regrouped.

Once out from the prefabs, Shepard's legs stretched out into the ground-eating lope they'd both been taught at boot camp, one they could - and had - keep up for hours, and he matched pace with her. Grass stalks whipped at their armored legs, hissing and crunching in their passage, the sharp, clean scent of the crushed stems rousing him from the tiredness biting at his heels.

Team Two had also taken advantage of the enemy's momentary confusion, and met them climbing up the path to where their getaway ride had been stashed.

James shoved his way through the others to Kaidan's side. "Why'd you leave the Atlas right out in the open like that? You know one of them'll just use it to come after us."

"Did one of them just hop in?"

"Huh?" The lieutenant turned his head to look; Kaidan knew the Atlas would stick out among the prefabs like a sore thumb even at this distance. "Yeah -"

"And the rest are setting up in their usual heavy weapons support formation?" Kaidan insisted.

"Yeah... so?" James still sounded puzzled.

Kaidan lengthened his stride. "We need to run. We need to run _right now_."

Shepard picked up on the urgency in Kaidan's voice. "Double time it, people!"

They ran flat out for the shuttle James had hidden under camouflage netting. Garrus and Kaidan pulled the fabric off while the lieutenant dove into the cockpit to start the engines without the usual preflight checks. Shepard took the co-pilot's seat, leaving Tali and EDI to pile into the back. James had them in the air before the door was even lowered; Kaidan and Garrus had to drop the netting and scramble to find and grip handholds.

The explosion caught everyone but Kaidan by surprise. Kaidan smiled, because his tampering of the Atlas's fail-safes had worked, and because he now found himself basking in the collective if cramped admiration of both teams. Granted, it wasn't a very nice smile, but he didn't care, and no one could see it.

Garrus was the first to catch on. "You sabotaged the Atlas." Kaidan nodded.

Tali cocked her head. "That was a much more powerful explosion than usual when one of those mechs is destroyed."

"Major Alenko did not sabotage the Atlas," EDI demurred. "There is only one possible explanation for the increased magnitude of the explosion: he sabotaged its power plant, turning it into a bomb."

"Rigged to detonate when the next person got in and started it up," Garrus finished. "That was a sneaky, underhanded, and ruthless thing to do, Kaidan." He clapped Kaidan on the back with his free hand. "I like it."

Kaidan made a modest, self-effacing gesture. "Thank you. I think."

"Good work, Kaidan," Shepard said, turning to look at him from the cockpit. "James, what happened to the colonists?"

Kaidan could just make out James shaking his head in admiration. "Once the sarge rounded up all the wounded, the others just, just _melted_ away into the dark. I swear they just jumped into holes that closed up after 'em. Oh, yeah, I told 'em they could take the wounded back to our base - Sarge mentioned they were low on medical supplies."

James's report was interrupted when Liara's voice sounded on the priority channel; they all stiffened when they heard the urgency in it. "Shepard, we have a problem."

"I read you, Liara. Where are you?"

Shepard's calm voice steadied the asari; she sounded less panicked when she replied, "Back at our base, when I realized the pod is more damaged than Cerberus's preliminary reports suggested. I don't know what we can do, but I do know that some sort of system failure cascade is imminent. If we don't open it now, the Prothean could die!"

"We're on our way, Liara. Just sit tight."

They could all hear the archaeologist's frustration at being close enough to touch the greatest scientific discovery since the beacon on Eden Prime, and yet unable to for fear she would destroy it. "There's not much else I can do. I'll transmit the files I got from the repositories -"

Kaidan spoke up. "I have a copy, Liara, remember?"

"Oh, yes. Goddess, I just hope I was right in assuming the answer is in those files. Liara out."

"James, redline it," Shepard said as she stood up, clapping the lieutenant on the shoulder as she passed him.

"Aye aye!" the lieutenant said with suppressed glee, and beneath Kaidan's feet, the almost imperceptible purr of the engines ratcheted up to a dull roar.

"Kaidan, put those files up on the monitor there, would you?" the commander said as she came up to stand next to him, and pulled off her helmet. The rest shifted and shuffled around as best they could to give them what space there was, which wasn't much.

As if she'd given them a cue, Kaidan and Garrus also unsealed their helmets; Kaidan took out a wipe and scrubbed the dried blood off his face, glad that the commander had her back turned. Garrus pointed to a spot on his own scarred face; Kaidan wiped the indicated area on his chin and gave his friend a small nod of thanks.

He never liked letting her see the not-so-hidden cost of fighting by her side, for fear Shepard would put him on the sidelines, keep him safe and insulated from the war. He knew she was tempted to, sometimes, when he was injured in the field; she got that frightened look in her eyes and her mouth went white around the edges. She just didn't have that luxury. None of them did.

Kaidan put away the dirty wipe and watched in growing concern as Shepard stared at a screen full of static, with the occasional undecipherable symbol whipping by, like it was showing her something else entirely. All it was giving him was a headache. No, she was not simply _seeing_ - she was almost entranced, and her eyes seemed to glow as she grew absorbed with something only she could comprehend.

The commander shook herself when the Alliance symbol appeared in place of the static; the whole process had only taken a couple of minutes. Kaidan touched her elbow when she blinked, looking like she was forcing herself to focus back on her surroundings and the present, and kneaded the bridge of her nose. "You okay?"

She snorted. "Yeah. Well, as okay as I can be with two new pieces of Prothean data stuck in my head. I'm still... digesting them. I think I'll be digesting them for a long time."

Kaidan hated to ask, like he was trying to determine if she would suffice as some kind of Prothean can opener, but crass as the question was, it had to be broached. "Do you have what we need to open the stasis pod?"

Shepard touched her head again, as if to assure herself it was still there. "I think so. Let's just hope the mechanism still works."

"We're coming up on our base," James announced from the cockpit.

They launched themselves out and forward before the shuttle even settled on the ground, heading for the other shuttle, where Cortez had rigged some lights around the stasis pod, giving the somber scene a cockeyed air of festivity. Like a funeral in the middle of Christmas.

"Shepard!" Liara cried with the joy of a beleagured soldier greeting her unlooked-for reinforcements. Shepard gave the asari's shoulder a bracing squeeze.

Kaidan took the others aside for a brief discussion about securing a perimeter, and they went off to do it, though with many backward glances at the pod. Flocks of recon and combat drones flew like pigeons released from a magician's sleeve, and were herded along on their way by Garrus, Tali and EDI. James and Cortez bent over their omni-tools, linking them all into a sensor net. Satisfied, Kaidan went back to the pod.

The commander stood by the stasis pod and waved her omni-tool over it, then pressed on a particular section at one end that didn't look any different from any other. A piece of the surface flipped open, revealing a control panel of some sort, which she pressed three times.

After a silent moment passed as they waited for something to happen, Liara said, "Um. Nothing's happening."

"There's a, a kind of boot-up sequence, for the biological as much as for the mechanical," Shepard tried to explain. "You can't wake up someone from a fifty-thousand-year nap just like that." She snapped her fingers to illustrate.

It did seem rather anti-climactic, after the night's many excitements. Kaidan scratched his sweat-damp head with one hand, and drummed the fingers of the other on his helmet, now hanging from his belt, as they continued to wait.

Liara screwed her face up. "Wait, how did you know to do that? When I looked at the files we stole, all they contained was static - I thought they must've gotten corrupted somehow. All that effort, for nothing."

Shepard gave her an incredulous look, then turned it on Kaidan. Turning to face the asari again, she said, "You mean neither of you saw it?"

"All I saw was static, too," Kaidan confirmed. "Gave me a headache."

"It must be the Cipher that helped you comprehend," Liara said, staring at Shepard with sapphire intensity.

The commander grimaced and opened a hand in agreement, before touching her forehead again. "It's the only possible explanation."

There was a hiss, and they all wheeled around to see the stasis pod opening, cold white mist escaping out the sides only to dissipate before it reached the ground. Feeling a mix of apprehension, intense curiosity, and a dizzying sense of history, as one of the first people to ever see a Prothean, much less a living one, Kaidan looked down at the... the being inside.

"Goddess," Liara breathed in reverence.

At first glance, the Prothean looked very much like holos he'd seen of Collectors, with a similar head, and four eyes, but then the reddish, archaic-looking armor the being wore dispelled the illusion; like all the horrific husk-type creatures the Reapers had created, Collectors wore nothing. The frost clinging to the Prothean like cobwebs faded, and the being opened his - her? its? - quartet of eyes, blinking as he - she? it? Gah! Did Protheans even have recognizable genders? - looked up at them.

The next thing Kaidan knew, he was flat on his back, stunned by the - it had to have been a biotic blow. _A biotic... the Prothean is a biotic_, made it through his scrambled brain. He managed to get up on one elbow in time to see the Prothean struggle out of the stasis pod, stumbling on unsteady legs to escape them. The sudden commotion had drawn the others, and they approached with weapons in hand. Liara said something, but it didn't register through Kaidan's confusion.

Boxed in, the Prothean backed away, staring at them all with wide, double-pupil eyes. Shepard hauled Kaidan up to his feet with one hand, and made a hand-down motion with the other at the rest. Weapons were lowered, but not holstered. Still weak and disoriented, the Prothean turned and fell. Liara made an aborted motion, as if to reach and help, but didn't quite dare.

"Remember, it's been fifty-thousand years for us, but for the Prothean, it's only been a few minutes," Liara said, keeping her voice calm and even so as not to startle the being.

"Easy, guys, easy," Shepard said. "Back up slowly. No sudden moves."

All the commander's precautions seemed to be for nothing, because the Prothean's attention was no longer on them; instead, he/she/it was staring - gaping - with palpable disbelief at the prefabs and at the fields of crops around them as the sky began to brighten with false dawn. Alone, Shepard walked towards the forlorn figure and touched the Prothean on the shoulder. In the silence, her indrawn breath was loud, and she stiffened. The strange being fell again and didn't get back up.

_Yeah, she has that effect on me, too_, was the inane thought that passed through Kaidan's mind.

Kaidan moved forward, but Liara stopped him with a hand on his chest and a fierce shake of her head. Thwarted, he fired up his omni-tool and started scanning, for all the good it would do at this distance. The others drifted up to them, and gave each other identical looks of helplessness, with the usual question mark in Tali's case.

"What's going on?" Garrus whispered. Kaidan had never heard the turian sound so uncertain.

"EDI, can you... can you do anything? Scan them, or, or something?" Tali asked.

"No, I cannot. Biometric scans of Commander Shepard indicate a small increase in beta wave activity, but no other anomalies account for their rigid poses."

All eyes went to Kaidan, probably because he was the most experienced medic - or the second in command, God help him - and all he could do was shrug and shut down his omni-tool with a frustrated swipe. "The medical readouts aren't showing anything!" He thought he could be forgiven for the shrillness in his voice, under the circumstances. Clearing his throat, he subsided and said, "Let's give her a minute or two, she's in no danger."

"So... what do we do? Should we try to separate 'em, or, or -" James's voice trailed off.

James's question became moot when they heard Shepard exhale and saw her step away from the Prothean. Kaidan only just managed to stop the worried mass stampede towards the commander, and had to remind everyone with great force that they shouldn't get too close to the Prothean. He moved to Shepard's side himself, well aware that everyone but EDI was fidgeting. "Shepard? You okay?"

"Yeah, I think so. I've just had the oddest sensation of someone walking over my grave, and that I just walked over someone else's." Her gaze went to the still-kneeling Prothean. "His. And now I've got a third memory stuck - shoved - into my head."

He gave her a sympathetic look. "As if you don't have enough to deal with, huh?"

Shepard snorted. "Yeah."

Then, to Kaidan's shock, the Prothean spoke - perfect English. He stood there in a kind of glazed amazement he thought the rest of the crew shared as Shepard spoke to the Prothean, though he snapped out of it pretty quick when the Prothean snubbed the commander like that and walked away.

James was the first to voice his indignation on Shepard's behalf. "Can you believe that shit? Acting all superior, like it's some kinda huge favor to help us?" he said, jerking a thumb at where the Prothean was standing well away from the primitives.

"Well, there is evidence that the Protheans uplifted humans," Liara said, trying to placate the lieutenant. "That, that air of superiority is, perhaps... justified," she finished weakly in the face of their disconcerted stares. James didn't exactly look mollified.

"Commander, we've got company - friendlies!" Cortez hastened to add when everyone reached for a weapon.

"Oh, yeah, must be the casualties I told Sergeant Petrov to bring here," James said. He jogged over to meet a truly motley collection of vehicles descending onto the tiny settlement.

"I'd better get the Prothean - hm, he never told me his name - up to the _Normandy_," Shepard said as she looked at the lonely figure standing apart. "Liara, Garrus, Tali, Cortez, take our... our new guest up, please. We can put him in, let's see, the port cargo hold - it's empty and there's plenty of space. Liara, do what you can to make it comfortable. I don't think I have to tell you how high the stakes are or what's riding on this."

Liara nodded, then hesitated. "Aren't you coming with us?"

"I'd like to meet the soldiers who survived Cerberus's surprise attack. I can't... I can't give them much, but maybe I can give them hope. Remind them they haven't been forgotten. Sometimes that can be more important than supplies and ordnance. Besides, it would be dishonorable if I don't acknowledge them in some way."

The asari nodded understanding. "Of course. We'll see you later, then."

Shepard took it upon herself to explain matters to the Prothean; Kaidan frowned when their new guest didn't even pay her the courtesy of turning to face her, instead looking over his shoulder at her. Granted, the broader field of vision his extra eyes gave him meant he could see her just as well, but still. Giving her a regal nod that looked condescending to Kaidan's admittedly biased eyes, he followed her to Cortez's shuttle, where she introduced everyone who would be going up with them. Liara looked ready to burst with questions; Kaidan hoped she'd be smart enough not to badger the Prothean too much.

When he went to her as she stared up at the departing shuttle, Kaidan surprised an expression of deep weariness on Shepard's face before she saw him, just a second too slow to mask it with briskness. He wasn't fooled. "You're tired."

She looked about to deny it, but then surrendered and dropped the pretense, to his secret delight. "Yeah. It's been a long night."

He dug into a pouch, coming up with two energy bars, and handed one to her. Pineapple flavor, the only kind the Alliance made that didn't taste like flavored wall grout. "Here. It'll just hold off paying the bill, but hopefully it'll be enough to get you through the next half hour."

"What a cheap date you are," she joked as she unwrapped it.

Deepening his voice on purpose, he breathed, "I'll make it up to you." Shepard gave him a knowing smirk, even as her eyes flared. He made up his mind to make good on his boast as he gnawed on his own energy bar.

James came up at that point, towing a short, hard-looking woman, and made the introductions. Judging from the large amount of mismatched omni-gel patches on her armor, she and what was left of the garrison had been in the field and away from any sort of military re-supply for weeks. Even after all the fighting they'd done tonight, the _Normandy_ crew looked slick and shiny in comparison, and from the dismay in her eyes, she was aware and was embarrassed.

That didn't stop the sergeant from straightening her shoulders with painful dignity and snapping off a parade-perfect salute, which Kaidan and Shepard returned with the same solemn gravity. Anything less would've been a grievous insult to such courage and endurance.

"Major Alenko, Commander Shepard. It's an honor to meet you both." Hero worship had edged out the bone-deep weariness in Petrov's eyes. "Seeing you inducted as the first human Spectre inspired me to enlist, Commander, and the ceremony honoring the second human Spectre was a real bright spot in a bad time." She was too professional to squeal, but he could tell it was a near thing.

Under the stress, grime, and exhaustion, Sergeant Petrov turned out to be not as old as Kaidan had expected, and reminded him so much of Ashley at that moment that his heart ached. The same determination, fear kept under tight discipline, the relief, the haunted eyes, but... had the gunnery chief ever looked that young?

Kaidan felt uncomfortable being the target of all that earnest admiration; he was used to it being focused solely on Shepard - where it damned well belonged. "I think that was the whole point of the ceremony."

As if she felt his unease, Shepard said, "Could you introduce me to the rest of your team, Sergeant?" She looked aside; Kaidan followed her glance and saw people carrying makeshift litters from the vehicles into one of the prefabs. "Kaidan -"

His feet were already moving him in that direction. "I'm on it," he told her over his shoulder.

"Major Alenko is an excellent combat medic - your people will be in good hands," Kaidan heard Shepard tell the sergeant.

After retrieving the medical gear he'd stashed in the storage room, Kaidan went out to find the sergeant's only medic, who fell upon him and his supplies with a cry of relief, and led him to the worst cases.

Never willing to pass up an opportunity to teach - a reflex honed by the time he'd spent with his biotic students - Kaidan drafted James for the medical chores; affable as always, the lieutenant did as he was told with no complaint, even when their patients cursed at him. James guffawed at some real zingers, and told them he was saving up the good ones.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kaidan saw the commander come in; she knelt down by those still conscious, and he didn't miss how their eyes lit right up when they recognized her. He couldn't hear her over the din of people in pain, but he could guess that she was passing along words of encouragement.

It wasn't bad, really, all things considered; the fact that there'd been no deaths was damned amazing, in light of the forces that had been arrayed against them, and with all the confusion that usually accompanied a night sortie. When you threw in the chaos of an ambush and the counterambush, it was downright miraculous.

Still, there was nothing he could do for the ones who had lost limbs when they hadn't been quick enough to avoid a frag grenade. As it was, they'd nearly bled to death. Not even Dr. Chakwas, with all the high-tech gear in the med bay at her disposal, could replace them. Damn it. Damn Cerberus.

The medic, Doc Blackwell, who looked fresh out of boot camp to Kaidan - and therefore much too young to be shouldering all this responsibility - finished his rounds and came up to him. "I think we've done all we can, sir."

Kaidan looked up from his omni-tool and shut it down on seeing those bleak, tired eyes. The sergeant's troops all had that strung-out look that said they'd been fighting for much too long, with no reprieve in sight. "Your first tour of duty?"

Blackwell looked down. "Yes, sir," he whispered.

He gripped Blackwell's skinny shoulder. "You kept your people alive when you got cut off from support. You're doing fine." For a moment, he thought of his students, of Anderson, trapped on Earth, cut off from the Alliance, and facing near-impossible odds.

The kid's eyes came up from his boots to meet Kaidan's. "Without Commander Shepard, it would've been a lot worse."

Oh God, there was that hero worship again, but what could Kaidan say? That they could've done it without the _Normandy_ crew, when it was obvious that wasn't true? That they hadn't come to relieve them, they'd only come for the Prothean?

"We couldn't have pulled it off without your team, either," Kaidan said. When the young man opened his mouth, Kaidan added, "Not without a lot more casualties than this."

Blackwell looked around, his face screwed up in concentration, and seemed satisfied. "I think you're right, sir." Almost shy, he said, "I didn't understand why Sarge held us back, but it was to let you do all the fighting, wasn't it? So that... so that we'd be free to mind the civilians. Dr. Cam - fuck." He frowned.

"Did Dr. Cambiata help you?"

The kid's frown deepened into a scowl of intense betrayal. "He did, that rat bastard, while all the time he was passing intel to Cerberus. We all thought he was a hero for not staying behind with the little kids and the oldsters and the pregnant women, for volunteering to be the medic for the civilians once we had them trained up enough to do hit-and-run attacks with our squad."

Blackwell had probably worked closely with the collaborator, had perhaps even trained under him. Shepard had said it was common practice for colonial garrisons to share expertise and personnel: it fostered good will, homogenized training practices, and broadened the horizons of both civilians and soldiers. Kaidan had had ample experience of just how uncomfortable living with a hostile civilian population could be from his time on Horizon; it'd felt like he'd been operating in enemy territory.

"What's going to happen to him?" Kaidan hoped they didn't expect Shepard to take him away; the _Normandy_ wasn't really set up for prisoners.

"A lot of us wanted to put him up against a wall and shoot him, but Sarge said we had to follow due process even if we _are_ in the middle of a war. That that's what separated us from scum like Cerberus." Blackwell sighed at this extravagant demonstration of mercy.

Kaidan was impressed. "She's right."

Blackwell shrugged. "She said something about putting him in one of the caves we use to store supplies. Some of them are pretty deep, and you'd never be able to get out of them without climbing gear. Even if you were able to, you could get lost forever if you don't have maps."

Kaidan nodded, then pressed the unused medical supplies on the boy. It wasn't much - most of it was disposable, single-use items - but he knew it was a wealth of equipment for the straitened Eden Prime soldiers. "Speaking of supplies - here, you can take all this."

Blackwell's mouth opened and closed; Kaidan could see the kid's prominent Adam's apple bobbing up and down against the collar of his battered hardsuit. "But, but, but won't you get into trouble?"

"Don't worry about it. If anyone asks - and I doubt anyone will - I'll tell them I... forgot to pick them back up after all the excitement."

"All - all right. Thank you." The kid wrapped his arms around the satchel, hugging it to himself as if he thought Kaidan would change his mind and snatch it back. "Thank you very much. We'll put it to good use."

Kaidan felt a little ashamed when he saw the gratitude shining in the other man's eyes at the pittance he was offering. He thought he knew now how Shepard felt after the Blitz. Infusing his voice with all the confidence he could muster, he said, "I know you will."

He had just finished his rounds when Shepard came in, and he watched as a flicker of dismay crossed her face at the number of casualties. At the question he saw in her eyes, he said with a sigh, "I've done everything I can. No deaths, at least." Cold comfort.

She seemed to hear the _It's not enough_ he didn't say, and what seemed like a world of understanding passed between them. She knew his bitterness, his regret, his helplessness, because she'd been there before, standing in the shambles of only God knew how many colonies that'd been attacked; she'd helped to put them back together, again and again. The realization shook him.

"We have to go. Liara tells me there's a... situation developing with our new guest. And I still have to report to Hackett."

"Sounds serious," Kaidan said as he followed her.

"Yeah, well, everyone expected a few data discs or something, not an actual living Prothean with an attitude and a chip the size of the Citadel on his shoulder." Shepard sighed. "The crew was unprepared, and things are getting a little, er, tense."

"Can't really blame 'em."

Kaidan was introduced to the rest of Sergeant Petrov's team, and endured both their scrutiny and admiration; his work with the casualties must've eased them enough to dispense with military formality, and so he shook hands all around. They were a disparate group, ranging in age from Blackwell's youth to a white-haired engineer just shy of retirement.

Petrov picked up on his curiosity, and explained, "It was pure luck we were away from the garrison when Cerberus invaded. We were out on some training exercises in the middle of goddamned nowhere when we got the news. I dragged Charlie here," - she clapped the stocky engineer on the back - "out of retirement, kicking and screaming -"

"I didn't scream," Charlie said with immense dignity. Under the sergeant's jaundiced eye, he amended that to, "Much."

Ignoring this, Petrov went on, "Anyway, he knew some guys with some militia training and tech know-how, we got 'em together, then they went blabbing to some colonists who wanted payback. We trained 'em as best we could, and we've been harassing Cerberus with their help from day one. To be honest, it feels like we've been scrambling from one damned thing after another ever since."

"You won't be scrambling alone for much longer," Shepard assured her - and her crew. "I'll discuss the matter with Admiral Hackett."

The casual mention of the admiral had them all looking wide-eyed again. James came and shook hands with them in that easy, friendly way of his, and promised to buy them a round of drinks after the war before he climbed into the shuttle. Kaidan was pretty sure they didn't know what to make of EDI when she was introduced.

"I thought the Citadel Council banned AIs," Charlie said, his eyes riveted to EDI's chassis while the AI talked with Shepard about the drones. Kaidan didn't think it was just the technology of her platform that had the engineer staring in fascination.

"Cerberus has never allowed little things like ethics, morality or laws stop them," Shepard said in a dry voice, catching the tail end of their conversation.

Petrov's troops looked at each other; it was clear they were wondering if the commander was insane for having not just an AI on her team, but a Cerberus AI at that, but were too polite to say it out loud. EDI nodded at them, and followed James with a whirring of motors.

From the lack of protests at their leave-taking, Kaidan gathered Shepard had explained things to them, but there was still disappointment on their faces as they saluted them in farewell, a courtesy which Kaidan and Shepard returned.

Kaidan blew out his breath when the door closed. "Were we ever that young?" he asked as he sat, his voice sounding plaintive even to his own ears.

Settling into the seat next to him, Shepard gave him a small, wry smile. "We're old soldiers now, Kaidan."

"Yeah. I guess we are." He glanced up to make sure EDI was in the cockpit, then gave Shepard a stern look. "I expect you to report to Dr. Chakwas when we get back."

She gave him the usual sardonic, "Aye aye, sir," in reply. It was practically their own private ritual now.

Kaidan didn't let it stop him from reaching over and taking her hand. As they both slid into tired slouches, Shepard gripped his fingers back.


	10. Chapter 10

Shepard always looked after her people first, her gear second, with herself coming in a distant third. Kaidan had always admired that, but he decided to rearrange her priorities with a gentle but implacable hand, just this once. Having fifty-thousand-year-old Prothean memories invading her mind was not an everyday occurrence.

"Good job with those cannons, EDI, though it's a shame Cerberus destroyed them," Shepard was telling the AI, who took the compliment as her just due.

Kaidan wondered if EDI had anything in her programming similar to the positive feedback loop everyone else had, and if the AI felt pleasure or pride. If he could ever stand being in the same room with the platform without his fight-or-flight instinct firing, he'd ask. She shouldn't be offended if he talked shop with her over a terminal, right?

"Oh, and please make sure you, Garrus and Tali pass along what data you found on Cerberus's computers to Alliance Command." The commander snorted, an exasperated smile tugging at her lips. "Though I suppose Garrus was too busy taking care of his competition to do any hacking."

"Yes, Commander," EDI said as she returned her weapons to Cortez, and left for the elevator once Shepard had dismissed her. Unlike the rest of the team, the AI had no armor to remove.

Kaidan said nothing as they helped each other out of their hardsuits; he'd learned a few things from her silences, he thought as he caught James's eye and directed the other man's attention to the commander's armor and weapons. The hint didn't have to be hammered home, for once; the lieutenant took one look at Shepard's tired face and gave Kaidan a nod and a conspiratorial wink.

Moving quite fast for a man still wearing heavy, bulky armor, James took the pile of gear from the commander's arms while she was busy chatting with Cortez. "You can leave this to me, ma'am - you'd better take care of our guys before they start some kinda diplomatic incident."

Not a man slow on the uptake, Cortez took charge of Shepard's weapons before James could drop them. "Yeah, about that... They, uh, requisitioned rifles, ma'am," he said, looking chagrined. "I didn't want to give 'em out, but they did have both the authority and permission, so..."

Shepard's face twitched in what Kaidan thought might've been a suppressed wince, but she rallied, raising an eyebrow at the news. Her voice was remarkably even when she said, "Rifles, good God. It's all right, Cortez, I'll handle it."

She turned and clapped a hand on James's broad shoulder and said, "You did a good job leading Team Two out there today, Lieutenant."

James's armor creaked as he puffed up in pride - and maybe some relief. The lieutenant had told Kaidan a little of what had happened on Fehl Prime over drinks - maybe more than either of them should've had - and Kaidan knew the incident still haunted the younger man. The success of their mission would go a long way towards restoring the younger marine's confidence and self-esteem - just as Shepard had planned, no doubt.

"Thanks, Commander."

She nodded and ran a towel over her head as she watched the lieutenants haul her things away. When they both finished dressing, Kaidan escorted - towed - her with a firm hand on her elbow to the elevator, but when it arrived, she punched the button for the CIC deck instead of crew quarters.

At his frown, she said, "I need to report to Hackett, and then I have to resolve that situation with the Prothean before shots are fired."

Shit, he'd forgotten that the whole point of their mission was now sitting in the port cargo bay, which was an indication of just how tired he was. "Oh, yeah, I should've realized that when you put on your dress blues." He looked her up and down; she smirked when his gaze lingered. "Not that you don't look great in them, but I kinda doubt they'll impress the Prothean."

Shepard rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I get the feeling I'm gonna need every advantage."

"All right, but promise me you'll come to the med bay right after."

She took a breath to retort, then winced; it was a subtle thing, but he still saw it. At his raised brows, she muttered an irritable, "Yes, yes, fine."

"I can go calm the crew down while you're briefing Hackett, if you want," Kaidan offered. "Negotiations would be less tense if people weren't actually pointing guns. That kinda thing sorta negates the process."

Shepard brightened. "That's a brilliant idea. Better leave the Prothean to me, though."

He grimaced at the thought of those four strange eyes boring into him. "You can take him."

Kaidan stayed in the elevator while the commander disembarked on the CIC deck, his eyes glued to her ass until the doors closed, and rode back down to engineering. The sight of the nervous marines hovering at the door to the port cargo bay with assault rifles drawn made him rub his face. Liara was there, too, harried and harassed nearly to the point of gibbering. It was a good thing she didn't have any hair, because he was sure she'd be tearing it out by now.

His patience wearing thin, he said a few pungent words to the jittery marines that shocked them speechless because they knew he never said anything stronger than 'shit' if he could help it. While they were still stunned with indecision - and preoccupied with searching their souls for anything that could hold off Shepard's imminent wrath - Kaidan hustled them out of the cargo bay and off the engineering deck, leaving Liara with the Prothean. They were good men, really, just out of their depth; their misguided adherence to protocol had been their clumsy attempt at dealing with a situation way above their pay grade.

The Prothean said and did nothing while this had been going on; he - at least his gender had been determined and Kaidan knew which pronoun to use - knelt in a pose of meditation the whole time, all four eyes closed. So why did Kaidan have the disquieting impression the Prothean wasn't as calm as he looked? Kaidan was happy enough to leave the alien and the puzzle he presented to Liara and Shepard, and escaped to get a shower.

Still a little damp, Kaidan entered the med bay and plopped himself down on an examination table, narrowing his eyes against the bright lights. Dr. Chakwas came over to tsk and fuss over him in her usual quiet, professional way; it was quite soothing in its familiarity, a balm to his frazzled nerves.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he was back on the SR-1, when the biggest complication in his life had been inappropriate feelings for his superior officer, and the most dangerous things he had to face were geth and Ashley's enthusiastic hand-to-hand combat training. Ashley had worked him - and the rest of the crew - over but good, he thought with a reminiscent smile. God, he missed her no-nonsense attitude, and Pressly's friendly bickering with Adams, and... There were too many names on that memorial wall.

Chakwas prodded him, scanned him, asked the same brisk questions she always did, shook her head at the bruises on his torso even as she took care of them, and reminded him of his next acupuncture session. He gave her his ritual grimace and grudging promise in return, because not even Chakwas expected him to be enthusiastic about being poked with not one but lots of needles.

The commander breezed in at that moment, collapsing more than sitting down next to him with a soft grunt, and admired his bared torso, or maybe just his fading bruises. To Chakwas's deep amusement, he flexed his muscles for Shepard, who gave him an appreciative smirk.

"What did you tell the marines?" Shepard asked as she shrugged off her jacket. Her voice was muffled as she pulled the black shirt over her head. "By the time they finally got to me, they were practically foaming at the mouth. I settled them, of course." This last was imparted with an air of sublime confidence.

Chakwas made a noise of annoyance when Kaidan shrugged and dislodged her scanner. He frowned at the bruises marring his commander's coffee-with-milk skin. Cerberus had really done a number on her; she looked like she'd been beaten with sticks. Big sticks.

"I dunno what they're so upset about. I just told them they'd answer to you if they screwed up what could be the most important alliance since the Citadel Council gave humanity an embassy by accidentally shooting the Prothean. By the way, did he ever tell you his name? It's kinda rude to keep calling him 'the Prothean'."

"Javik. His name's Javik." Shepard looked discomfited. "He can, um, apparently read people."

Chakwas cut in with a delicate cough. "There. Now, is there anything else, Major?" She fixed him with a stern maternal eye. "You're not hiding anything, are you?"

"I wouldn't dare, Doc," he said as he shrugged his shirt back on. Turning back to Shepard, he raised an eyebrow. "Somehow I'm guessing you don't mean he can read body language really well."

"No, I mean that he can literally read a place or person, just by touching them," she said, propping her elbows on her thighs so that Chakwas could examine her back.

"So that's how he can speak perfect English now. Huh." Kaidan wondered if it went both ways, remembering how the Prothean - Javik - had collapsed when Shepard had touched him. Was Javik also a security risk, too? Could he access classified information by touching someone with the password?

"Memories with the greatest emotional impact seem to come through the clearest." With an expression of intense absorption, the commander lay down on her back when Chakwas pressed her shoulder. "I saw the Protheans' last stand on Eden Prime. Javik isn't just the last of his people - he's their last hope."

"It must be a terrible burden." Maybe the Prothean's arrogance had been a mask for grief, despair, and utter loneliness. He felt hollow at the very thought of losing Shepard, much less being the only human left alive in the galaxy.

"He wasn't supposed to wake up alone." Shepard's lips curved in a humorless smile. "He was supposed to rebuild their empire with a core of a few thousand survivors after the Reapers went back to dark space, finish uplifting us primitives, take us over, and lead us against the Reapers when they came back fifty-thousand years later. Whether we liked it or not."

"Considering the alternative..." Kaidan blew out his breath, boggled by the thought of the known galaxy being ruled by Protheans. If Javik had succeeded, could Earth have been spared? "Liara's head must be spinning." God knew his was revolving at speed.

"Javik's definitely not what she expected," the commander agreed.

"Was it bravery or desperation that made them get into those stasis pods?" Kaidan wondered. "Having to start from scratch after a few millennia, after their civilization's been wiped out, knowing they lost the long war." Living with the shame of their failure until the day they died sounded a lot like hell to him.

Shepard raised her brows. "Who says it wasn't both?"

Done with Shepard's back, Chakwas gestured for her to take off her trousers. Without a shred of self-consciousness, the commander kicked off her shoes and shimmied out of the curve-hugging garment, revealing more black-and-blue blotches on her legs.

"Well, I'm gonna go get something to eat." Instead of sitting here with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, while the doctor laughed at him with her eyes.

Kaidan stuffed his face and watched as the commander, trim and neat again, sauntered out of the med bay and made her rounds with her crew, visiting Liara, then Garrus, exchanging smiles each time their eyes met. On her way to the elevator, she left the faint scents of sweat and medi-gel in the wake of her passage.

Knowing it would take Shepard some time to chat with the rest of the crew, he ensconced himself in his mancave - er, starboard observation - and wrote up his reports, adding his observations of Eden Prime's resistance and recommendations on how to aid it. If they could, a part of him could not help thinking.

But what Eden Prime's colonists needed wasn't manpower - they needed training, organization, and supplies they couldn't manufacture locally, like medicine, armor and weapons. Before humanity discovered the mass relays, countless wars had proved that any local population, with proper motivation, intelligence, leadership, and grasp of logistics, could become a soldier's worst nightmare, even against a superior force. The colonists didn't even have the food problem those rebels on Earth must've had - practically every square centimeter of the planet was given over to food production.

Unless, of course, Cerberus bombarded them from orbit, if the Illusive Man sanctioned a scorched earth policy of that scale. Surely that was beyond even Cerberus's resources.

_They brought back Shepard from the dead. Who am I to place limits on Cerberus's ingenuity?_

No, Cerberus had more resources than anyone had suspected, even the Spectres or the STG, but they were finite. The loss of the _Normandy_ SR-2 had been a grievous blow, but the loss of Shepard and her team was incalculable. And that was before he took into account the mass defections of ex-Cerberus scientists on Gellix, their failure on Eden Prime, and the commander's raids on their labs, facilities, and military installations. They had to be feeling it.

Kaidan shook off the entrancing vision of the Illusive Man's probable reaction to his underlings' various failures. Resistance movements, he had to think about resistance movements. Sergeant Petrov's actions showed that the elements that had shaped successful rebellions on Earth held true on Eden Prime. He just hoped that was enough to convince Hackett. Remembering the expressions of bone-deep weariness on the faces of Petrov's team, he prayed that their trust would not be betrayed by expediency.

When he'd finished his reports, he made some more sandwiches in the mess and took them up to her cabin, because he'd seen how the communion with the Prothean archives and the Prothean himself had taken something out of her, even if she hadn't said anything. The biotics she'd used during the battle at the dig site had to be taking their toll on her, too. When he arrived, he found her clothes scattered on the floor in a ruler-straight line to her bathroom. He congratulated himself on his timing.

Shepard looked up from her terminal at his entrance, the motion slow and jerky, as if just the effort of raising her head tired her. Dressed now in just a black shirt and shorts, he could see her skin and hair were damp from her shower, but her eyes looked puffy and bruised, her complexion so drained as to seem gray. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself," Kaidan replied as he stepped down and put the plate on the coffee table. The fact that she didn't follow and immediately fall on the food like a starving varren told him a lot: it meant she'd gone past her limits. Again.

Stepping back up to her side, he couldn't resist trailing a finger across her forehead, tucking a strand of wet hair out of her face as he reached for the teapot on the shelf behind her. She didn't let just anyone see her _en deshabille_; aware of the responsibility that went with her rank, she always presented a professional front to everyone - even more so now that they had a reporter on the ship - so it was gratifying that she'd let him see her with her hair down, so to speak.

The contented little purr in the back of her throat, and the way she leaned into the caress, made something inside him melt. Then he shut her display off.

"Hey!" Shepard protested, but he caught her hand before she could turn it back on.

"Come on," Kaidan said, coaxing her out of her chair and ignoring her lukewarm complaints about all the paperwork she had to do. "You've been staring at the same page since I came in, and staring at it for another ten minutes won't get it done. Now go sit on the couch while I make some tea."

She made a noise that sounded like something between a grunt and a wordless murmur of protest, but she didn't try to stop him and take over herself, like she usually did. Either she finally trusted him to do it right - pretty damned unlikely - or she really was too tired to give a damn.

While he was busy following Shepard's exacting ritual of making tea - for the first time ever - she observed him from the couch with a tired but watchful eye. Did she know the familiar activity relaxed him, too?

As they waited for the water to boil, he frowned at her, then at the untouched plate. "You need to eat something, Shepard."

She mumbled something that sounded like assent, but still didn't move. Kaidan resorted to pressing a sandwich into her limp hand, but she just stared at it like she'd never seen one before. It was obvious the crash was really bad this time. Maybe she'd get the idea if he gave it some time, so he started picking up her discarded clothes.

"I can pick up after myself, Kaidan. You don't have to do that." She made to stand, but he was already finished.

"Sit your ass back down and eat, dammit." He shooked out her dress blues and folded them over her chair so they wouldn't get wrinkled. It was a task well within his abilities, even if he didn't usually encounter things like her sports bra - he took it off her and then forgot about it - and he sat down next to her when he was done.

Shepard finally seemed to recognize the sandwich still in her hand was food, and bit into it with an expression of mild trepidation. Kaidan wasn't sure whether to be amused or insulted at this perceived slight to his food preparation skills. Not that it mattered; once her first mouthful was on its way down, he could rely on her empty stomach to do the rest, no matter how little appetite she thought she had.

Since talking and eating at the same time was bad for digestion, something frowned upon by medical professionals across the galaxy, they didn't speak. He just watched as she raked her free hand through her hair in an attempt to dry it, content to sit next to her in silence, not feeling any urge to break it just yet. Not until the water boiled, sending the soothing scent of the leaves drifting out along with the steam, and was poured into tiny porcelain cups so delicate, light shone through them.

Besides, revealing their most fraught and profound secrets over tea was part of the whole ritual.

As he lingered over his second cup, waiting for her to finish the last sandwich, Kaidan said in his most blandest tone, "You endangered the mission to save those colonists."

She gave him a searching look, her gaze intense as she read him for... what? Anger? Fear? Not, dear God, ambition, surely. Shepard bore a load on her shoulders that would flatten him. If she expected to find censure, she was going to be disappointed, he thought as he returned her scrutiny.

"Yes," Shepard said, not bothering to deny it or pretending to misunderstand. It was one of the things he loved about her, but from her neutral voice and her remote expression - he wondered if this was how she reported to Hackett - she was braced for an unpleasant reaction. Did she think he'd rat her out?

The commander's behavior would have to be much more erratic for him to even contemplate doing that; the very thought made him feel sick to his stomach. So far she had only used their primary mission objective to exceed orders, even if she'd stretched it to the breaking point. She hadn't tried to rescue the captured colonists Cerberus had mentioned, though he was sure she'd very much wanted to.

But Shepard's canny interpretation of orders wasn't what he objected to - at least if the ratio of risk versus reward was sufficient and didn't quite bend their mission parameters into a pretzel - what he objected to was the way she'd put herself in danger to accomplish her goals. Maybe he could reach her that way, since demanding a direct accounting of her actions would just put her back up.

"We need you, Shepard. I - I... need you." _Stop throwing yourself into the line of fire when it's not even necessary, dammit_, Kaidan didn't say, even if he was tempted.

She gave him a wry, lopsided smile over her cup, the steam wreathing her face lending her an aura of mystery. "I need you, too, you know."

He thought about their midnight conferences, the endless hours of strategizing over cups of tea, the quiet doubts she told no one else, the fears she didn't dare reveal to the others. "You need someone who can tell you 'no'."

Shepard said nothing, but her lips quirked. He was starting to understand her silences now, and not just the angry, sullen ones. They couldn't be broken with words, but were like puzzles to be deciphered. Encountering - and countering - enemy electronic warfare in all its myriad forms as he did on an almost daily basis, he thought he wasn't too shabby at solving mysteries.

"You _know_ you're losing your objectivity, don't you?" Kaidan said as realization dawned.

Refilling her cup instead of looking him in the eye, she said, "Yes, I am. When it comes to things I have a certain personal stake in, anyway."

"Trying to expiate your sins?" he said, his voice heavy with irony.

The two fingers she pressed against her chest and a wry smile acknowledged the hit. "I try. Every day, I try. I guess part of me keeps thinking, if I just save enough people, somehow it'll make up for all the ones I couldn't." She stared at a spot in the air.

Kaidan didn't know what Shepard was looking at, but he thought he could hazard a guess. She shook her head, that faraway look in her eyes fading as she focused back on him with a rueful twist to her lips. "I know it sounds stupid. It's not a kind of mathematics that'd work in any universe, much less ours."

"Just because it doesn't make sense doesn't mean it's stupid. Or that I don't understand. My students... they're my, my redemption, but they're, they're so much more than that. Yanno?"

Shepard shot him a shrewd glance. "You're teaching them because you care about them, not for yourself."

"Yeah. Exactly." He set his cup aside. "I'm willing to help, yanno."

She blinked at him in genuine bafflement. Because she didn't believe him, or because she'd been going on alone for so long, she couldn't imagine an alternative? Either one made his heart twinge.

"Help...?" she repeated, as if it were an unfamiliar word she'd never thought to apply to herself.

"Yeah, help you do whatever it takes to rescue colonists. So you don't have to do it all alone."

Her mouth opened and shut, cup paused halfway to her lips; he had only seen her rendered speechless a handful of times. "And why would you risk, not only your life, but your career to help me?" she finally said, and remembered to sip her tea.

Taking a deep breath of the aromatic air, Kaidan said, "Well, first, it's worth doing in its own right. Second, you need backup. Third, I can diddle the reports if I knew in advance what was going on. I think that's enough to go on."

"'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?'" Shepard murmured.

He refilled his cup and topped up hers, letting the heat of the porcelain warm his fingers. "I'm on your side. Always."

Black irony lent a humorless curve to her lips. "Except when you think I'm working with terrorists, anyway."

It was his turn to touch his heart with two fingers, and made a conceding gesture with the cup in his other hand. "Touche."

Shepard raised her brows in mild surprise when he rose no further to her bait; he declined to inform her that he was too tired to bite. "You're being optimistic if you think we'll have the chance to do it again. We were just lucky that our primary objective happened to put us on Eden Prime in the right place, at the right time. If Cerberus hadn't so carelessly left their logs lying around, we might not have encountered Petrov and the colonists at all. Though I'm glad we did."

Kaidan gave her a thoughtful look over his cup as he sipped the hot brew. "If there's one thing that you've taught me, it's that you make your own luck." It wasn't, exactly, an accusation. It also wasn't, exactly, just an offhand remark.

The enigmatic smile gracing her lips was not quite an answer. "I'm flattered, but you're seriously overestimating me if you think I did anything more than just seize the tactical moment."

"Hm," was all he said in reply.

The part of his mind that never stopped analyzing everything was still working through all the implications. The moment she had discovered those logs, Shepard had involved the colonists with cold-blooded efficiency, then Petrov through them, and folded them all into her plans for Team Two's distraction. Since she came from the same background herself, she had to have some sense of how her fellow colonists would act. Thanks to their unsanctioned and unexpected support - though he'd bet it hadn't been all that unexpected to _Shepard_ - she'd brought them and the general plight of Eden Prime to Hackett's attention, practically gift wrapped.

The resistance itself would become even more effective now, with morale high from its part, however small, in the victory over Cerberus's forces, and the hope the commander had given them with her presence. And speeches, probably, which he'd missed because he'd been dealing with the casualties. More tangible help could be distributed through Liara's Shadow Broker contacts, piping valuable intel and maybe even materiel to where it would be most needed.

After all that, if the admiral _didn't_ act in favor of aiding the resistance, Kaidan would eat his own omni-tool without sauce.

"I want in," he found himself saying.

Anyone who could improvise all of that on the spur of the moment, and give it the best possible spin to push all of the buttons Hackett's ruthlessly practical soul had, was worthy of not only his admiration, but his help. The sheer audacity of it took his breath away.

It was also too pat to have been her first effort. No, she'd done this before.

Shepard hesitated. "It's one thing for me to risk myself and my career, but you -"

He brushed that aside with an impatient wave of his hand. "We're all gonna come out of this covered with glory, or we're not coming out at all. That's really the least of my concerns."

Taking a deep breath, Kaidan looked her in the eye and spoke with all the seriousness he could muster, "This is a part of you, and that's not gonna change. I don't want it to change - I don't want _you_ to change. But I want to be a part of it. A part of you."

Lifting a hand to brush her fingers across his cheek, she said, "Is that why you want me to teach biotic students, too? To be a part of your redemption, like you want to be part of mine?"

"Actually, I was thinking that there aren't that many biotics with as much combat experience as you in the service," he said as he leaned into the caress. "But, yeah, I'd like that."

She brushed her hand against his when she lowered it; without really thinking about it, he linked his fingers with hers.

"I think I'd like seeing you do something that has nothing to do with the military. Well, not much, anyway." Shepard looked a little uncertain of her information; it was clear the evacuation of Jack and her students had been only the second time Grissom Academy had ever impinged on her awareness, other than sending David Archer to the school.

"The Ascension Project does borrow heavily from Alliance military hierarchy to give some structure and order to the students' lives, but it's hardly as rigid as it used to be at Brain Camp," Kaidan assured her.

Opening her hand, she said, "Well, you'd know. From what I saw, life there seemed... sedate. Protected, but not stifled. Pretty far removed from - this." She gestured at her cabin, encompassing it and the _Normandy_, and their daily battles against Reapers and Cerberus by extension. "Without those pressures hemming us in... what would we become?" she mused aloud.

"I don't know," he said with maybe more candor than tact. "But I think I'd like to find out."

Neither of them spoke of how unlikely that was, but then neither of them were in the habit of looking to the future with despair.

"All right," Shepard said after a moment of contemplation. Had she been boggling at the thought of being in an occupation where she wouldn't get shot at? "You're in."

He eyed her. "I am?"

Shepard grimaced. "It's a pretty unequal trade: an honorable, meaningful job for a court-martial if the consequences for excessive initiative ever get bad enough that a scapegoat's needed. And it won't always be as neat as Eden Prime. Or as clear cut."

_We_, she'd just said. The prospect of getting cashiered seemed unimportant compared to that.

"We'll just have to make sure that never happens, then," Kaidan said. He set down his cup and shook an admonishing finger at her. "Now I meant what I said about helping you, but no more of this 'throwing yourself into the line of fire for no reason' crap. We're gonna do it sensibly."

"Hmph, already trying to boss me around, huh." The fondness in her lopsided smile took the sting out of the complaint. "I have to admit, it does feel... comforting to know you've got my back on this."

He tried to picture her, sitting in a tiny cabin somewhere, in the dark, sweating over the reports, wondering if _this_ time, she'd gone too far. Well, there would be no more of that. They could _both_ sit in the dark, sweating over the reports, wondering if _this_ time, _they_ had gone too far.

There should be records of all the reports she'd ever filed, which he should be able to dig out of the system. Maybe he could even wheedle EDI into giving him a little help on the sly. He could see now that he'd have to do his homework if he wanted Shepard to take his offer seriously. The sound of her hastily smothered yawn broke into his thoughts.

"S'ry," she mumbled. "'S not the comp'ny..."

She'd eaten all the food and they'd finished the pot of tea together. Mission accomplished, he thought with satisfaction. Time to wrap things up.

"It's okay. C'mon, let's put you to bed. I'll clean up." With reluctance, he got to his feet, plucking the empty cup from her loose grip, and pulled her up with him, since he hadn't let go of her hand.

Too tired to argue much, Shepard allowed him to hustle her to the bed, muttering faint protests he ignored when he tucked her in. He pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek, even as he felt some regret for another missed opportunity; missions often left them too wrung and exhausted to do anything more than just crawl under the covers and hold each other. Thanks to the Prothean data she'd had to absorb, Shepard had crashed much earlier than he had, for once. He watched as her face relaxed in sleep, then went to gather up the tea things.

Damn, her yawns were contagious; Kaidan found his jaw cracking as he rinsed out the teapot and the cups. His energy seemed to run out like the water he'd used to wash the delicate porcelain, and it took an incredible effort to do something as simple as pull his boots off. He wouldn't have bothered to take off the rest of his clothes, except that the useful pockets on his trousers were a bitch to sleep on, and the straps on his shirt were liable to cut off circulation. After stripping down to his shorts, he waved his hand to lower the lights.

Shepard snuggled up against his side when he slid in next to her, and he fell asleep with her clean scent in his nose, her warm body in his arms, her breath feathering his neck.

* * *

There was a sound way off in the distance, something Kaidan was doing his best to ignore, but it was persistent and annoying and was getting on his nerves in the worst way. Suppressing a whimper as he dragged himself out of Shepard's warm embrace, he disentangled himself from the sheets and shivered in the cool air of her cabin when he realized the noise was coming from her computer.

There was a dull throbbing at his temples, and what felt like a steel band was tightening around his skull, signs of an impending migraine, just waiting to ambush him. Sometimes they took him like a guerilla attack, hours after the action, just when he thought he'd escaped unscathed. It did nothing to improve his mood, which was going from bad to foul in record time when the numbers on the chrono on the bedside table wavered in his vision. They'd only gotten two hours of rest.

It was a sign of how tired she was that she didn't wake up at once with a true soldier's instant alertness like she usually did. He kept his angry cursing to a pure mental space. Even here, in her own sanctuary, no one would leave her in peace for a lousy eight-hour stretch. Telling Hackett or whoever it was to go to hell was looking better all the time.

Through the strobing, pulsing spots of pain in his head, a beguiling thought slid into consideration like a shy private, one that stopped him in his tracks, and his eyes widened: what was stopping him from taking the call himself? Nothing. Well, besides Shepard's anger at his interference, and the disappointment of whoever was on the other end if they got him instead of the commander. Shepard wouldn't appreciate it if he caused a diplomatic incident just because he wanted her to sleep in. No matter how much she needed her rest.

He came to the conclusion that he'd wake her if it turned out to be Hackett; if it was a follow-up to the Eden Prime situation, Shepard would want to be roused out of a sound sleep to hear it.

Even though the lights were dim, Kaidan had had enough practice navigating Shepard's cabin by now that he didn't bark his shins on anything. He climbed the shallow steps to the office section in nothing but his underwear, but he didn't plan to turn on the visual feed.

A press of a holographic button silenced the chime that'd been drilling through his skull, and opened the connection. Specialist Traynor was on the other end, and said, "Commander Shepard, there's a call for you on vid-comm."

"Yes? Who's on vid-comm?" he answered as he quickly turned down the outgoing volume, unable to keep the irritation out of his whisper. He didn't want to wake Shepard, and his head felt delicate enough that he didn't want to speak any louder.

"Oh! Major Alenko," Traynor stuttered, "I, I, I didn't expect you to answer Shepard's comm." _From her cabin_ was left unsaid.

To be fair, he never had; he and Shepard had always tried to conduct themselves with discretion on board the ship.

Kaidan waited in silence, holding his head to keep it from pounding itself to pieces, as he gave Traynor a moment to pull herself back together, then repeated, "Who's on vid-comm?"

"It's Admiral Anderson, sir."

Well, that meant it couldn't be critical. Anderson was probably just hoping for news that could raise morale for the troops trapped on Earth - and check on Shepard at the same time. Sometimes it felt like he, Garrus, and Anderson were the only ones who paid attention to Shepard the woman, not Shepard the commander, and they were the only ones who worried for her. He suspected Hackett did, too, but was constrained by expedience and the needs of the war.

He sighed. "Did he happen to mention what he wanted to talk about?"

"No - well, not to me, anyway."

A vicious spike lanced through his temples, and he winced. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could burrow back into bed and Shepard's arms. "I'll take the call."

There was an uncertain silence on the other end.

Kaidan sympathized with the young woman as much as the pain let him; Traynor must feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. "It'll be okay." He hoped.

"Well, er, all right," was her dubious reply.

"It's okay, Traynor, the admiral will know this is above your pay grade."

Traynor snorted. "_That's_ true. What should I tell him?"

"The truth, of course. Tell him you've alerted the commander, and put him on hold."

"Er, okay," she said. _It's your funeral_ hung in the air. "Traynor out."

Fireworks burst in his skull and left their ghostly images smeared in the corners of Kaidan's eyes as he dressed, always disappearing when he kept turning to catch them. It wasn't that much brighter outside, but the light still stabbed into his eyes when the doors opened and he groped for the elevator button. The odd metallic scent of recycled air entered his nose when he took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled through his mouth as he went through the exercises his doctor had recommended.

The exercises didn't always work, but this time they got him through the CIC and into the war room without looking like a spastic Hallex addict on a week-long binge. And if he did, the war room guards were too polite to say anything. Sparks and static were still popping and fading in his peripheral vision when he accepted the call; he took a prudent grip of the railing and leaned as casually on it as he could as the image of Admiral Anderson appeared in the projector.

"Kaidan!" The image was sharp enough to show surprise and then worry. "I wasn't expecting - is everything all right?"

Kaidan narrowed his eyes against the brightness of the hologram, and answered the question the admiral hadn't asked. "Shepard's fine - she had a bad crash and I didn't want to wake her."

"You look like shit."

Rubbing his face, Kaidan said with a rueful grimace, "I... won't disagree with your assessment."

Anderson gave him a sympathetic look. "The usual?"

Kaidan stopped himself from nodding just in time. "Yeah."

"Let's keep it brief, then. What's this about Shepard's bad crash?"

Keeping his explanation as succinct as he could, Kaidan told him about the Eden Prime mission. At the deepening concern he saw on Anderson's face, he added, "Shepard's in no danger, but I think deciphering all that data and then communicating with the Prothean took a lot out of her, much more than usual. At least she didn't fall unconscious, this time."

He exchanged a squinty-eyed but meaningful glance with the admiral; they both remembered Shepard falling into a fifteen-hours-long coma after the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime exploded, if for different reasons.

The admiral looked bemused. "A living, breathing, fifty-thousand-year-old Prothean! Sounds like something out of a trashy tabloid. Now I've heard everything."

"So, what's the word from Earth? Have any of my students managed to get in touch with you?"

Anderson gave him an equally brief precis; the news that the admiral had made contact with the kids in Chicago was one of the few bright spots in a grim litany of cities fallen, populations wiped out, and resistance strongholds decimated, the words punctuated by the pulsing of Kaidan's temples.

Kaidan didn't press for word about his parents; the admiral didn't offer any.

"How is Shepard, really?" Anderson asked in a transparent attempt to change the subject. "You know she'd never tell me herself."

"I, uh..." Kaidan hesitated, because you just didn't rat out your fellow soldiers, much less your commanding officer. The fact that his migraine was sending what felt like red-hot knives slicing into his skull had nothing to do with anything.

"I'm not asking as your superior officer, dammit, I'm asking as a friend!"

Kaidan found himself bracing automatically at the sharp tone, but it was the pain he heard underneath it that decided him. "She's tired - we all are - but she's driving herself into the ground trying to fix things. I'm doing my best to get her to take it easy between missions, but I'm not having a whole lotta luck."

"I suspected as much. She's always had trouble delegating when bad shit's going down." The admiral frowned. "Drag her out for some shore leave."

"With everything that's going on with the war, she feels guilty about taking any shore leave at all. Our friends take turns inviting her out for drinks or whatever, and she plays along, but you can tell her heart's not in it." Kaidan shrugged. "To tell the truth, I feel that way, too."

They both contemplated this glum state of affairs, though Kaidan was sure he was the only one trying to do so through a blinding headache.

Anderson's face cleared, looking thoughtful instead of depressed. "You know, I have an apartment on the Citadel, which I'm obviously not using right now."

Kaidan was confused by the apparent non sequitur. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I remember. What about it?"

"I'm going to give it to Shepard. It can be a place for her to unwind without making her feel too guilty about it."

Kaidan's jaw dropped. "That's... that's very generous of you."

"It's more making a virtue out of necessity than any real generosity on my part." Anderson grinned. "Pretty nice digs, if I say so myself. When they first presented it to me, I suspected bribery, but it turns out all Citadel Councilors get the same accommodations."

"They never took it back when you stepped down?" Kaidan found that hard to believe, considering how closely his Spectre division expense reports were scrutinized and got bounced back to him for corrections.

"Nope, and I could never have afforded it on my pay, even after I got promoted." The admiral nodded satisfaction at having come up with a plan. "I'll call back in a day or so, after we've got our new base up and running. Keep this under your hat - if I tell her myself, she can't refuse. Now go on, get your ass to the med bay before you fall over. Anderson out."

Since Kaidan was only staying upright at this point through sheer willpower, he saluted, and sagged when the hologram faded. The trip back out to the elevator went by in a blur of bright lights, glowing colored streaks that burned themselves across his retinas, until he reached the blessed darkness of Shepard's cabin. Even there, his own personal light show continued to plague him, endless starbursts exploding and pinwheeling behind his eyelids to the jagged rhythm of the hammers bludgeoning his brain.

On automatic pilot, he undressed again; violent shivers wracked him as his bare skin encountered the cool air. With shaking hands, he lifted up the covers and crawled in next to Shepard, fully intending to stay on one side of the bed so that he wouldn't disturb her - he wasn't so far gone that he'd forgotten she needed her rest. Despite his best intentions, she mumbled, rolled over, and threw her arm over him, and he clutched her hard. The warmth eased his chills; he could feel her relaxing back into sleep at once, but the migraine wouldn't let him escape so easily.

Maybe he should've done as ordered and gone to the med bay, but it wasn't like Chakwas could do anything but give him painkillers that would mix badly with the drugs already in his system, an empty pallet, and a dose of friendly sympathy. He just had to endure, like he always did, and it was easier, or maybe more comfortable, to do it here in the shelter of Shepard's embrace. They had so little time to themselves, he was loathe to give up any of it, even for his own needs.

Well, dammit, it was high time he did something for her, as soon as his head stopped hurting long enough for higher brain processes to function. If he couldn't find a way to get his commander some down time with all the possibilities an apartment on the Citadel presented, he might as well resign his commission right now.

Kaidan finally fell asleep with various scenarios spinning through his mind, blissfully unaware of the consequences that would unfold from Shepard taking possession of that apartment.


End file.
